Here Comes Tomorrow

Most Hilarious Web Advertisement, Ever

2009-04-03T20:42:00.009-04:00

I suppose this makes me a bad person.

I don't know if finding this ad utterly hilarious says more about me, or about the kind of people who'd be this crass to sell insurance.

Watchmen, Coraline and Adaptation

2009-03-12T06:48:00.004-04:00

Reading This Preview Will Make You BlindSo I've been meaning to write about Coraline for a long time, and say something about Watchmen since I saw it last Sunday.

The two movies taken together, though, make for an interesting contrast in how to adapt a book for the screen. Both make large changes to the original source material, altering characters, events, trimming and adding to the story, in addition to the obvious changes one might make telling a story visually rather than with the written word, or in the case of Watchmen, sequential art.

However, one fails monstrously, and the other, I think, succeeds brilliantly. So what's going on?

First, let's discuss the failure. Coraline.

Uggh.

Coraline is the worst, most insulting, most viscerally repulsive mainstream movie I've seen in many years. It's the worst adapted work I've seen since Starship Troopers. It made me feel ill to watch it, and I almost left.

I know, I know; your average critical response was positive. Why did I hate it?

Because Coraline the movie takes all the heart, wit and charm out of the book, stomps it into a bloody paste, and pisses on it. The movie Coraline is coarse, rude, reeks of being written by a marketing department, and is full of absolutely rank misogyny.

It's truly awful.

Coraline the book is a story Neil Gaiman wrote, according to the About the Book section in my paperback edition, for his daughter(s).

More than ten years ago I started to write a children's book. It was for my daughter, Holly, who was five years old. I wanted it to have a girl as a heroine, and I wanted it to be refreshingly creepy.

After a discussion on the lengthy process he used to write it, he returns to the subject of the heroine of the story:

A decade before, I had begun to write the story of Coraline, who was small for her age, and would find herself in darkest danger. By the time I finished writing, Coraline had seen what lay behind mirrors, had a close call with a bad hand, and had come face-to-face with her other mother; she had rescued her true parents from a fate worse than death and triumphed against overwhelming odds

The primary reason I detest the movie version of this story is that, in MOVIE Coraline, none of that is true.

Coraline is not small for her age. She's not the heroine of her own story. She doesn't triumph against anything.

Coraline is, in fact, constantly rescued; by the Cat, by ghost children, by deus ex machina, and most odiously, by Wybie, a male companion invented solely for the film so that audiences wouldn't have to sit through a movie where a GIRL did all the exciting parts.

Seriously. Wybie doesn't exist in the book at all. From the first moment I saw him, I knew we were in trouble. He rides up on a dirtbike wearing the 3-eyed mask from Splinter Cell, for fuck's sake. He's not just the male character, the hero, who has to tell Coraline everything she figures out for herself in the book, and at the climax of the movie, RESCUE THE HELPLESS LITTLE GIRL... he's also XTREME.

So, a story written for girls, featuring a heroine as the main character, has turned the female lead into an also-ran who is constantly rescued by two male characters, a cat and a Marketable Boy.

It gets worse.

In the book, Coraline's mother is a kindly, harried woman, busy with work and moving to a new home, who dotes on her at-times difficult child.

In the movie, she is a total bitch. She hates Coraline. She literally cuts a deal with her to destroy the wall of a house she doesn't own, hacking at the wallpaper with a knife, just to get her own daughter to leave her alone.

Her mother talks to Coraline, in the book. She tries to entertain her. She makes sure that Coraline has food to eat in the house, even though, like many difficult children, she refuses to eat what everyone else is having and insists on very specific frozen foods. Coraline's mother is patient and kind, if tired, and her worst sin against her daughter is to refuse to buy her a pair of neon-green boots, and get her sensible clothing for school.

I know; what a whore, right?

In the movie, there's no edible food in the house. The fridge is full of rancid fruit (despite their having moved in days before... which is just odd. Whose food is that?)

Coraline's father looks like he's halfway into chemotherapy for a terminal cancer, and fading fast. He's constantly bullied too, by Coraline's bitch of a mother, who hectors him about his work until he retreats into his office, where he's presumably dying from the bone marrow out.

(He gets to use a 20 year old green screen computer; she uses a laptop. Everything is over the top and oppressive, in their relationship and in their home. They want us to pity him, and hate her, you see.)

So when Coraline goes to the Other World and sees her Other Mother, it isn't like the book, where she's making a subtle bargain with a very slick Devil figure. In the book, Coraline is tempted to sell her soul for a *slightly* better world, where all the petty annoyances are gone, and you get whatever you want.

In other words, she almost barters herself for instant gratification.

In the movie, Coraline gets real food, and a father who isn't a walking skeleton, and a mother who doesn't (appear) to hate her.

That's hardly the same choice.

Everything in the movie is like that, though; the heart is ripped clean out of the chest of the book, and the resulting film is hollow, shallow and cold. But not to worry! It's PRETTY and full of shiny visual distractions! Like a musical sequence (not in the book), giant bug robots (not in the book), and magical milkshake dispensing chandeliers that must have arrived as refugees from a claymation Willy Wonka remake (you guessed it, not in the book at all)

The shallowness extends to the supporting cast, naturally. The upstairs neighbor, a kindly, slighly bonkers individual in the book, is recast as a flamboyant Russian circus performer who does superhuman feats of acrobatics while speaking in an accent right out of Rocky IV.

The cat, who has to prompt Coraline a lot more in the movie, is no longer a dry, witty, sardonic individual, but a smug know-it-all who, you guessed it, has to save the little girl. A lot.

Finally, you have the downstairs neighbors, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible. In the book, they're retired stage actresses.

"I played Portia once," said Miss Spink. "Miss Forcible talks about her Ophelia, but it was my Portia they came to see. When we trod the boards."

In fact, Forcible wants to get back into professional acting.

"Miriam, dear, neither of us is as young as we were."

"Madame Arcati," replied Miss Forcible. "The nurse in Romeo. Lady Bracknell. Character parts. They can't retire you from the stage."

So these are SHAKESPEAREAN ACTRESSES. Classical perfomers, albeit in some z-list Vaudevillian sense. Portia is from The Merchant of Venice; Ophelia from Hamlet, and of course they mention Romeo.

In the movie?

They're strippers.

I am not making that up. They were strippers in some tawdry burlesque show. Which they re-enact, in the Other World. For the kids.

This is my one-sentence reply to anyone who likes Coraline the movie:

"What kind of person adapts a children's book for the screen and says to themselves, 'You know what this story needs? MORE STRIPPERS'"

...

Watchmen succeeds, I think, despite being a very heavy adaptation, for precisely the same reasons Coraline failed. Coraline ripped the heart and emotion out of a story; Watchmen takes great care, even as it excises large chunks of the narrative or sidelines them for dvd-only releases, to keep the HEART. To keep the fundamental, emotional questions the book asks the reader, about power, apathy, and human connections, and what they mean in a world spiralling toward death, or to people who are no longer really human at all.

Doctor Manhattan, in particular, is great in the movie. I like the Snyder/Hayter/Crudup Manhattan *better* than the one Moore wrote, actually. In the book, Manhattan is, at best, a doting father figure, at worst, detached and adrift, lacking free will, drenched in superhuman apathy. The movie version is much more human, struggling with his loneliness and weakness, for as it turns out, even God may not be able to save people from themselves.

The movie's Rorshack struggles with his madness; the movie's Comedian finds out his armor of cynicism can't protect him from the real hurt in an uncaring world, and the movie Nite Owl/Daniel grapples with his feelings of inadequacy. These are core issues in the book, and adult concepts that require more thinking than most American movies are comforable with outside the indie circuit, and Snyder keeps them all in his film.

(I will admit, Silk Spectre II/Laurie is a bit weak in the movie. She's weak in the book too, though. As my roommate, and longtime Watchmen fan puts it, 'Watchmen doesn't give her much to work with.")

The most radical change is one of character, too. Ozymandias is a very different person in the movie. I like his character better here. In the book, he comes across as a bit of a superintelligent frat brother, fearsomely smart but soulless and self-important. For the movie, they take him in a different direction. If you had to sum him up in one word, it would be "resigned". Resigned to being 'The World's Smartest Man' and feeling, as he puts it, 'stupid' around other people. Resigned to the burden he assigns himself in the key events of the film. Resigned to suffer an enormous guilt.

I can see how you might prefer the earlier Ozy, and that's fine too. But it's worth noting that the biggest change in Coraline was to add a marketable male lead to a children's movie. The biggest change in Watchmen is that the writers/director had a different take on the emotional inner life of a major character.

Whether you agree with what Snyder did, or dislike his direction (as one friend of mine passionately does), you have to admit: he didn't tailor Watchmen to the marketing department. It's still set in 1985. It's still depressed, violent, and full of difficult concepts and imperfect people. It's rated R, which displeases the pundit class to no end, who love to predict its failure to turn a profit based on the lack of 'fanboys' being able to buy tickets. (Nevermind that, as the original book came out in the 80s, many of its 'fanboys' are middle-aged by now.)

Watchmen kept its heart, and Coraline sold its soul.

Ho-Chunk Casino.. IT'S A TRAP

2009-03-04T02:16:00.005-05:00

Admiral Ackbar tried to warn us!I've written before on the Ho-Chunk nation here in Wisconsin, and their charming PR campaigns on the local progressive radio station.

I love those things, as a fan of well produced propaganda.

Anyway, the Ho-Chunk operate several casino properties here in Wisconsin, the source of money they use, amongst other things, to sponsor radio I like to hear and propaganda that I love to listen to.

The casino part, these days, is not that out of the norm.

Their advertising for the casinos though, is something special.

Take a look at this Ho-Chunk Casino ad that has been floating around town on billboards for months now and tell me what you think:

Now, ok, I'm a white guy. I'm keenly aware that my ancestors perpetrated, then profited from, arguably history's most successful genocide (Australian Aborigines might contest that one).

So when I see a very large advertisement from a group of surviving Native Americans, encouraging me to come to their facility to enjoy myself, with the tagline 'It's Your Turn!'....

Yeah. Is it just me, or is that, in fact, more ominous than inviting?

It leads me to ponder certain scenarios in my blackly cynical imagination...

"Come on in Whitey! It's Your Turn! *ka-thud*"

"We're really good sports about your ancestors stealing an entire continent in a centuries long holocaust! Mind turning your back? We have... a surprise... for you! It might be cake!"

"Come for the blackjack, stay for the complimentary blankets!"

Nero Watch, Day 44

2009-03-04T01:59:00.002-05:00

ArghAfter waiting almost a week, and sending another two or three emails asking for help from 'Nelson', a tech support guy at Nero, I am about at the end of my rope.

I still do not have my keys reset, and now he won't answer emails about how to reinstall the one key he claims might be reset so that it isn't immediately deactivated.

Is this it, really? This is the customer service Nero provides?

All these years I wondered how Roxio stayed in business. I guess I know.

Microsoft blows these people away, with regard to customer service. But here's another quick comparison:

Yesterday, I purchased an order at Amazon using my Prime account, and it was accidentally sent to an ancient address instead of my modern one. This was completely and totally my fault.

Worse, by the time I caught the error, it was already in their shipping system, being prepped to be sent to a place I no longer live.

Amazon's stated policy is that once shipping begins, no take backs, but I was desperate not to waste the money so I went to their customer support section. They have a nifty feature where you enter your name and problem and THEY CALL YOU.

They actually did, too, within seconds!

I talked to an actual human being, who fixed the problem of considerable complexity that I fully admit I CAUSED, despite being under no obligation to do so.

That's customer service, and that's why I'll be shopping Amazon for years to come. Which, of course, they know, which is why they provide it.

Nero?

I guess Nero doesn't like repeat customers.

Nero Watch Day 39

2009-02-27T01:49:00.002-05:00

GeezSo it's official, the guy from Nero who *was* handling my complaint is ignoring me. It's been something like 48 hours since I showed him the photo proving that I own two copies, and no matter how many messages I send I can't get a reply.

Tomorrow I'll have to look into other options. I definitely want to talk to his manager now. I can't believe their TS people are allowed to, in essence, hang up on a customer and take the phone off the hook.

Jindal-Mania

2009-02-26T02:54:00.007-05:00

Oh God, Is this *It*, GOP?So, Obama, who is not shaping up to be my favorite President by any means (*cough* Bagram *cough* State Secrets Abuse *cough*), gave his big speech selling the still-half-assed stimulus plan to Congress last night.

It apparently went over very well, as most of his speeches do.

As a side note, I don't actually think Obama is a fantastic public speaker. He's decent, and stays unruffled/on the script. But his up and down psuedo-musical presentation always struck me as a little... sing-songy.

Fortunately, Louisiana Governor "Bobby" Jindal exists to show us what sing-songy REALLY MEANS.

Honestly, this moron from Baton Rouge is so not worth our time, nationally. He's a religious kook who thinks he exorcised a demon from his college girlfriend. He's a big pusher of Intelligent Design. He's from a state that has fallen into complete and utter ruin under Republican rule (first via Bush and FEMA and the botched Katrina/levee engineering disaster's response, then under his control). He opposes stem-cell research, equal rights for gays, even going so far as to oppose a bill that would let the feds *help* with hate crimes against the GLBT community... and also, the disabled.

Man, that'd be a great campaign ad against Jindal. 'Bobby Jindal Hates The Handicapped'.

But I digress. This clown, this rube, this utter baffoon, was selected to give the rebuttal to Obama's speech by the GOP, who are almost completely tapped out for 2012 candidates.

The consensus is that they might be down one more after last night.

DEAR LORD he is a terrible, terrible public speaker! He sounds like Mr. Rogers! Some people prefer to compare him to an informerical huckster; others, to a preschool teacher, and others still to various sitcom parodies.

(Actually, to me personally, he also sounds a lot like my ultra-religious Uncle Brad, who buys 'Army of God' t-shirts for his kids and attends one of those speaking in tongues type Protestant churches, but that's not a reference most people will get)

As for substance to his speech, there was no 'there' there, so to speak. It was awful, and shallow, and trite, the story of how his hardworking immigrant parents had it tough, so everyone else should, and oh by the way, he was actually working during Katrina, NOT LIKE THEM GUBMINT TYPES, har-har, and, oh yeah, the stimulus bill spends money on things he's too ignorant to understand, like Volcano Monitoring (who really cares when volcanos explode, not like we have them in the United States, right?).

Man a friend of mine from the Seattle area was pissed about the Volcano thing, living as he does in the general Doom Zone of Mt. Rainier.

The point is, he's a mealymouthed, platitude spouting, soft-spoken, treats-you-like-a-child half-wit of an orator, and the almost whole country, even Fox News, acknowledged this.

What a disaster, hehe. About the only person rushing to defend him was Ann Althouse, about whom I'll be very, very polite, since I will hopefully be starting UW-Madison's law school in the fall, and there's every possibility she might be teaching me a class someday.

No, I'm not sucking up. I do believe, however, in codes of conduct for Universities.

(Both in the sense that, I think they're a good idea... and in the sense that, I believe they exist regardless of my opinion, and have the power to smash a lowly student flat.)

Still, I will comment on her theory that liberals (and Andrew Sullivan), are being too hard on Jindal because he's brown:

Expressed by Josh Marshall (“absolutely cringeworthy”), Andrew Sullivan (“Jindal’s entrance reminded one of Mr Burns gamboling toward a table of ointments”), and others.

Why are all these people so confident that they are not manifesting racism? There’s just something about this man that doesn’t seem right, that you don’t care to examine exactly what it is, but you know it deep down in your gut somehow. Seriously. How do you know this is not racism?

ADDED: Andrew Sullivan proffers an answer to my question: “Maybe because there is not a trace of evidence of any kind that we are. Unless comparing Jindal to Kenneth the Page or Mr Burns taps unknown wells of racist hate in my heart. I mean, seriously.” I think deeper reflection is needed. Why the urge to paint him as a white white man? Where did that come from? Of course, there are unknown wells inside us all. When you have an instinctive response to a person of another race, why not seek knowledge?

Well, for one thing, as one of 'these people', I'm fairly confident I'm not just mocking him because he's brown... because, well, I'm not. I'd never heard Jindal speak for any length of time before the clips of the anti-Obama speech went on the radio; my jaw *literally* dropped when I heard them. It's not racist, or racist-overcompensating, to suggest that Jindal sounds like Mr. Rogers.

HE REALLY DOES SOUND LIKE MR. ROGERS

See, here's the thing, about Jindal being Indian, ethnically. A: It doesn't bother me one bit, and B: part of the humor in him being a genuine Mr. Rogers soundalike is that he doesn't look, or act, anything like Mr. Rogers. If you had never seen him before, had no idea about his politics or past insanity, if your very first exposure to Jindal was on the radio, hearing his voice, you could SWEAR that Rogers had crawled out of hell to give GOP talking points to a national audience.

(Or my Uncle, if you know him. Except for the crawling out of Hell part, he's not dead. Though he does live in rural Indiana..)

If anything, that is the polar, exact, absolute opposite of racism, in that one instantly leaps to the correct sensory conclusion (Bobby Jindal sounds like a dead, beloved children's host who has sold his soul to the devil in exchange for power), despite the glaringly obvious (and heavily marketed) aspect of his non-white ethnicity.

Jindal strikes me as something of a pathetic figure. His whole life has been one long series of accommodations to White Conservative America, from his selecting a new, whiter name for himself based on a goddamned sitcom, to conversion to ultra-conservative Catholicism, to joining the party of immigrant bashing and xenophobia and becoming its new, designated Non-White Spokesman.

Supposedly one of the reasons he exorcised his girlfriend, that he knew that she was 'possessed', is that she wanted to sleep with him. Really.

Basically, you can see here a man filled to the absolute brim with self-loathing, who is trying to force himself into a mold so that White Conservative America will love him.

News flash, Piyush "Bobby" Jindal: they never, ever will. Though they're happy to use you... for a while.

Nero Watch Day 38

2009-02-26T02:51:00.003-05:00

Not Much to ReportReally, just another day of them ducking, or at least not responding to or acknowledging in any way, my emails.

I guess I have to start all over again, possibly on the phone, which is sub-moronic. Honestly, I'm supposed to read two giant cd keys over the phone?

Plus, how would I supply the photographic proof I own them?

Argh. A friend of mine who works in tech support says I should call them, on the phone, and demand to speak directly to a manager, and reference the lengthy email chain to date.

I suppose I'll do that soon.

Nero Watch Day 37

2009-02-25T02:10:00.002-05:00

It goes on and on my friends...So I've spent the last few days in email conversation with Nero's tech support, and last night, well, Monday night (now that it's technically Wednesday), I got an email: my problem has been resolved! My key is reset!

Wha?

Which key? And that hardly solves the problem, I thought!

So I emailed back, asking which key and if they knew they still had work to do.

The response was priceless: the key I've been using for two years? The one that came in their shrinkwrapped box? It's invalid! So, presumably, they don't have to fix it!

Sigh. Gods.

So I got out the old digital camera, took more photos, this time of the old serial key emblazoned on a nero jewel case, side by side with the new key, and sent off the whole batch to Nero tech support.

Naturally, they then went radio silent. You've probably been hearing the stereotypical cricket noises on the internet tonight.

Roland Burris is Inherently Funny

2009-02-21T00:45:00.004-05:00

He Really IsSo I wasn't really blogging anywhere when the Roland Burris circus of fun was going on. It was honestly a depressing scene. Here you had an obvious toady of a corrupt governor (he's a lobbyist, campaign contributor and business associate of Blago's, though he thought it was clever enough to do much of that through Blago's wife) being appointed to the same Senate seat that Blago had been caught trying to sell on tape by the FBI.

Yet, most liberal blogs defended the appointment. It looked bad, you see, to block him from being seated... because a bunch of all white Senators would be keeping out the one black Senator, who was replacing the previous black senator, our new black President.

Burris even made sure to get himself photographed in a silly little tableau outside the Capitol, to try and fashion himself into a new Civil Rights icon or some such.

I agree, of course, that the way Harry Reid handled this mess was stupid. The way he handles EVERYTHING is stupid. It's a wonder the man doesn't walk around all day with his fly open.

Reid prevented a special election in Illinois that would have prevented all this. Heckuva job, Reidy. Thus, Blago got his foot, and his lackey, in the door, and...

Here we are this week! Burris was caught lying to the Illinois legislature's impeachment inquiry. Under oath. By the FBI, as it happened. See, he'd said, under oath, he had no contact with Blago's people prior to being seated.

Only it came out, actually before the committee, to whom he had given a written affadavit before speaking, he had met with Blago's best pal/probable extortion cutout/other lobbyist, a man named Lon Monk.

But, technically, he didn't work for Blago, so that was ok. Right?

Ahem. Turns out this week the FBI had at least one tape of Burris meeting... with Blago's brother. So Burris rushes to put out an amendment to his testimony under oath. It goes from "I didn't meet with any blago people" to "I met with 4 Blago people, including his brother, Rob Blagojevich". See, there's a one letter difference in their names. That's how you can tell they're not at all related. Oh wait a second..

But this was ok too! Because he'd turned down the offer to bribe Blago with a campaign fundraiser! Right?

Well, today he had to amend his amended testimony. Turns out, he didn't turn Blago's brother down.. He just couldn't raise the money.

Oops.

So, this is like perjury squared, or if you count the Monk lies, cubed, now.

Meanwhile, Burris' many former.. not exactly defenders, but... damnit, I wish the Right hadn't ruined the term 'appeaser'.. the Burris apologists on the Left, are almost eerily silent.

You got a lot of excuses for why we should let an obvious criminal into the Senate. Typically these ran to one of a few forms:

1: Ted Stevens was a criminal and nobody stopped him! He was corrupt!
My Response: Very true. Stevens was a Republican, and the GOP protected him. The rest of the Senate largely did too. Is that the kind of government we really want?
In addition, I would note that Stevens' crimes, while heinous, didn't actually involve buying a Senate seat. He was elected to the Senate, legitimately, on more than one occasion.

2: The 'optics' of keeping Burris out look bad! It looks racist on cable news (especially Fox)!
My Response: Of course the 'optics' look bad. Blago and Burris wanted them to look bad. You know what will look worse? When he's expelled from the Senate to start his term in a federal prison.

On another note, for the love of god, can we stop using the mealymouthed, ham-fisted, barely-even-English verbal cudgel of 'optics', please?

It's an assault on the language centers of the brain, I swear. Not everything needs to be discussed as if we're all soulless cogs in some marketing machine.

3: There's no established LEGAL mechanism to stop him being seated!
My Response: This one's a classic. While Al Franken dutifully beat back every petty legal challenge in Minnesota to get the seat he rightfully won, we couldn't put up a single roadblock for Burris, who is trying to steal one with the help of a legendarily corrupt governor. Ok...

Thanks to Often-Wrong Reid, it's true, our legal options were somewhat limited. But the DNC and Obama could have made it very clear to Burris that if he takes this job, he's a dead man walking, politically. No committee appointments in the Senate, no one legitimate will work for him in DC, no campaign support, and in 2010, a vicious primary that will break him into little bitty pieces.

Burris is an operator. He'd take the hint.

Instead... nothing was done. Thanks Reid. Thanks to you too, President Obama.

(I also love the legal 'analysis' here that suggests that you should be allowed to profit from a crime, i.e. the purchase of a Senate seat, merely because the Constitution forgot to mention buying an appointment as a disqualification. Right, right. The fact that, in the end, Burris purchased it for a fundraiser that never occurred only makes him a better criminal.)

Well, ok, fine, fine.

Just out of curiosity.... how does the Burris thing look now, to all the people who thought it best to let him in and be done with it?

Heh. I love being right.

Helpful AI

2009-02-20T19:17:00.003-05:00

The Future Is Here and Slightly UnnervingOk, so nobody reads this blog. Even if they did, they wouldn't care about my posts of old links that I want to keep handy somewhere.

Or do they? I just got this comment on an old list of comics and such that I no longer wanted on my blogroll:

"Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Outdated Links":

Monty and Woolley is back!"

That's.... great... Anonymous.

This is from a post from July 20th of 2008.

Wow. Even I had long forgotten I put that up there. Or anything in it.

So, err, to the helpful machine intelligences that now tell me about old webcomics being back:

Please don't kill me. I promise to be useful in the new machine empire.

Nero Watch, Day 33

2009-02-20T01:01:00.002-05:00

The Saga ContinuesSo I got a reply, of sorts, from Nero early this week.

It was to ask me to send them information I had already sent about my problem. The guy seemed to have access to only some of the emails I had previously sent.

I resent the information, and got an autoreply a few hours later.

Friday will be 48 hours since that autoreply. Sigh.

This is just going at GLACIER SPEED, isn't it?

Western Civilization in Flames

2009-02-18T14:07:00.007-05:00

Hilariously Awful

Just wanted to preserve a pair of stories for posterity. First, from The Huffington Post, which got it from TMZ, a picture of that freak Nadya Suleman, the woman who had six kids she couldn't support and decided to get in vitro fertilization to have 8 more.

Sadly, she lived.

Then there is this breaking news of our degeneracy from Xinhua, who must just be laughing themselves silly (being as they are an official news agency of Communist China), a story about a 13 year old british boy who's now a father!

How wonderful!

Even creepier, crushing poverty and hopelessness has left him looking perpetually 8 years old and with the most soulless eyes outside of a prison psychward.

Take a gander:

Read the story too, it's heartbreaking, assuming you aren't already dead inside like me.

Oh well.

(Note on image use: I chose to post these images to blogger because this post needs to preserve a record of the decline of our civilization for future digital archaeologists, and newsie sites move/lose these things all the time. I'm providing citations/links to the original sources, so I think I'm on the side of the angels here. If by 'angels' you mean 'devils who laugh uproariously at the suffering of man')

Nero Photography

2009-02-15T18:52:00.005-05:00

A Picture is Worth A Thousand WordsAll I have for my original copy of Nero, the one that got deactivated first and stopped working properly a month ago, is a cd case with the key written on a sticker on the outside. I pitched the box and all its bumpf ages ago.

The second copy though, was brand new, still in it shrink-wrap, as of this Friday, when Nero stole it from me via the magic of the internet.

Here are some handy photos!

First we have the ginormous pile of stuff that comes with the Nero Ultra Edition package I purchased. 90% of this is completely useless, or packing material. But I paid for it!

Plus, now, it's all I have to show for my money.

Friday was the first time this copy of Nero had ever been opened. It still has the Best Buy retail sticker on the outside.

Here is the second cd key, blacked out. Note how it says to be very careful to keep track of this information.

There's no warning, however, about Nero themselves ripping you off. Funny that.

Nero Watch, Day 29

2009-02-15T18:35:00.002-05:00

A Tale of WoeThis all starts about a month ago, as the title might suggest. My computer, whose Automatic Updates hadn't worked properly since the IU undergrad days, when they did something stupid to my copy of XP using their Domain Admin authority (they wanted amongst other things to force you to take updates at certain, assigned by them times, to spread out their bandwidth demands) got infected with one of the delightful new Eastern European worms.

The simplest course of action was to do a complete reinstallation of Windows, and after a few headaches this was accomplished, and I began the process of reinstalling all the software I need on a daily basis. Everything went without a hitch, from Winamp to Spybot to the various Sony things to make my PVR run, etc.

Everything except Nero.

See, I've installed Nero before. On this very same machine, but nevertheless, I have installed it. So when I installed it this time, Nero checked with their brain-dead DRM server and found that my cd key matched.. my cd key.

It began to nag me about this conflict every time I started it up. Nagware, irritating but not debilitating.

I went to Nero's website and found the email for their US Customer Service department, and fired off a quick message, explaining the situation and asking them to set my key back so that I didn't get nagged at anymore. I was annoyed, mostly by the fact that my dvd player felt it had the right to phone home whenever it wanted. But I wasn't particularly upset; I could even see how this had happened, though it's poor security and intrusive. I was inclined to chalk it up as another minor annoyance of the reinstallation process.

I quickly received an autoreply email from their Customer Service Department, early on January 17th, stating that they had received my message and would be getting back to me.

Days went by, and I forgot all about it, except when I had to click through the nagware screen for Nero. I had a minor surgery to deal with and other things on my mind, so I didn't follow up. I thought it had only been a couple of weeks while a month flew by, etc.

Nero never responded to my email. They did, however, 3 weeks after I initially informed them of their error, remotely deactivate my Nero software.

Now I was angry. I had paid, *retail* no less, for this software. Two copies actually! (We'll get back to that in a bit) I fired off another email, to the new address Nero prompted me to use just for incorrect deactivations. I told them that they had screwed up big time, and had had weeks to fix the problem, but had ignored me, and I was extremely irritated. I told them I expected an answer to this problem shortly.

None came, of course. After waiting another full day, I decided to remove the entire Nero installation, using a special 'clean install' tool they have on their site, so I could use the second copy of the software I had purchased ages ago, intended originally for another machine. After completely uninstalling Nero, cleaning the registry with their tool, and reinstalling, a process that wasted most of an afternoon, I was prompted for the new cd key.

Keep in mind, I had just opened the box on this package. It had never so much as seen the light of day, let alone been used. I put in the new key, off the new cd jewel case, and it accepted it.

For about a minute. Then it popped up a new message, said that key was also in use, and again robbed me of my legally purchased software.

I fired off a *third* email, again to the DRM email address. I was furious, and let them know that. Now I had been robbed twice, and ignored for weeks, and I wanted my cd keys restored so that I could use the software I paid good money for.

I'm still waiting on a reply. Tomorrow is the one month anniversary of the initial problem/email I sent to Nero customer service.

A month. I've literally waited a month for the courtesy of a response of any kind.

I will never purchase another Nero product so long as I live, and I recommend that anyone who reads this similarly abstains. Nero has the absolute worst customer service I've ever seen in my life.

Now I guess I get to spend a bunch of cell phone minutes trying to call a 1-800 number during business hours if I want their crappy software back. I'm honestly not sure it's worth the headache. I'm already using the OEM provided DVD player software now, which isn't as nice as Nero but also doesn't rob me blind. I don't really make backup dvds anymore, since I got a 1.5 TB external drive.

Then again, this is MY MONEY. I have a right to what I paid for.

I will update the blog with any further developments.

It's Alive!

2009-02-15T18:33:00.001-05:00

RestartWell, I've been sick quite a while now, but I'm feeling better and getting ready to go back to doing/posting stuff.

With that in mind, here is a filler post to help get old stuff off the front page.

American Automakers and the Left

2008-12-08T10:57:00.005-05:00

Tiring ShitI am so damn sick of hearing all this pro-Detroit propaganda from the left in the lead-up to the (regrettably necessary) bailout of the pathetic American car industry.

Personally I think of it as a short-term jobs program; we're not paying 30+ billion (or 15 now, more later, or whatever they come up with) to make cars, we're paying 30+ billion to keep the biggest resevoir of old labor in work until the Obama admin is forced to nationalize the 'BIG 3' (god what an annoying nickname) and turn their companies toward making something... anything... that we actually need.

Trains? Buses? Actual fuel efficient vehicles? (the Volt doesn't count and is a myth, more on that later)

We retooled the auto industry before, in World War II. They made great planes, terrible tanks, but basically, they made what we (thought) we needed, and they made a lot of it in a hurry. Under competent leadership there's no reason they can't be expected to make a decent product again.

The issue here is management. Make absolutely no mistake; we cannot trust the current morons at the top of the BIG 3 to do anything right. They've been fighting higher CAFE standards for years, they've been preventing California from regulating carbon emissions (because the Bush administration won't), and most famously, they beat down California's desperate, literally gasping effort to force them to manufacture *any* decent, high-efficiency vehicles so that their citizens wouldn't have to choke to death on carbon emissions. (Naturally Bush lent a hand with that one too)

Destroying the EV-1 was just the icing on the cake. GM's head tool Wagoner claims he feels just awful about that now. Riiiight. That makes it all better. (though apparently he did accept that his own poor decisions are to blame for the lead the Japanese automakers have in actual hybrid technology.. why is he still employed, again?)

While the Japanese companies aren't free of sin on these matters either, note that they capitulate to the will of the people on things like CAFE, while our AMERICAN companies subverted democracy using the Bush junta and the courts to stay in the big SUV business as long as possible.

Obama, to his credit, got out in front of this issue long before he was the President-in-all-but-Name, though I disagree with his idea to, for example, let bigger vehicles slide a bit on fuel economy ratings (that would only encourage people to buy, well, overly large cars).

The institutional culture at the American automakers is *sick*. Profit at any cost, style entirely over substance, and when they cannot compete, they simply double down on bad ideas (SUVs, Hummers/H-2s, etc).

At no point does our national security concern them, nor our health and environment. Ultra-capitalists might respond, 'Why should it?' Well, for one thing, if their cars destroy our environment and ruin our health... we won't be around to purchase them in the future, will we?

The best response for this line of argument, though, is simply historical. The automakers won every battle on pollution and regulation; they got to destroy the EV-1, they got to sell as many fuel-guzzlers as they could make, they got to keep the ludicrously low CAFE standards, they had the full might of the federal government brought to bear to beat states that, in their naive embrace of democracy, sought a better future for their citizens... in short, they operated the full Ferengi business model for the last 30 years.

What did that get them? They were all going bankrupt BEFORE THE CURRENT CRISIS, that's what. Ford, GM and Chrysler, destroyed themselves with their own lack of foresight and terrible business decisionmaking.

It really isn't hard to understand the plight of the American automakers. They made lousy cars that fell apart and cost a fortune to maintain for thirty straight years. They responded slowly to market forces, lagging behind their competitors, especially wherever efficiency and reliability were concerned. They gorged at the glut of SUVs and H2s and super large trucks, a glut that relied on a temporary abundance of very cheap oil... which the automakers relied on to last forever.

As if oil is a renewable resource, or OPEC a bunch of powerless buffoons.

Ask yourself: who do you know who drives American cars and *likes* it?

My family always bought American cars, and they almost always came to regret it. My stepdad has had a series of GM cars over the last decade, and they always suffer from mysterious sensor failures that require them to spend extended periods in the shop, at great expense.

Nothing actually breaks, mind you; it's the sensor. (I wonder when GM will cut the randomness out of it and make the sensors activate according to their stock price; whenever they drop more than 5%, sensor-powers-activate! and thus the revenue kicks up)

My dad had a series of abysmal Dodge cars, particularly a Talon that was tiny, cramped, and riddled with engine troubles; I drove a used Chrysler that broke down 13 times in one year. Et Cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

The best American car anyone in my family has ever owned is an old Dodge Caravan I still have as a used car. It's falling apart but refuses to die despite being over twenty years old... but even it was defective when it was driven off the lot, as they used bad primer on all the Caravans of that era (which led to a later recall that my grandfather, who originally drove this van, didn't take advantage of for some reason. You still see lots of dodge vans on the road with the same distinct pattern of paint peeling from that era to this day. An otherwise solid vehicle that will always suffer from a bad reputation as a result of cheap paint. Nice.)

There's a happy ending though; my father purchased a shiny new Prius a few years ago, and has had nothing but driving bliss ever since. He claims to get an average of 50 mpg, and can drive from his home in Indiana to Alabama for vacations on one tank of gas.

You see this same, sad story wherever you look. Automakers haven't just destroyed their brand; they stomped it into the ground, set it on fire, and pissed on the ashes.

Even in a friendly forum, you get this same litany of complaints. I was actually shocked, way back in November, to see how quickly the comments on a post about whether or not to save the auto industry, on a BIG 3 friendly liberal site, turned into a bitchfest about American cars.

But it did.

Even the author, who worked FOR the American automakers for years, won't drive American -- they love a particular Honda to death (like a classic romance, the very type of foreign car they were supposed to analyze so the Americans could copy and corrupt it).

It's like a comedy of errors, when even your natural allies can no longer overlook your decades of greed and excess.

Here, have some handy examples from Left Blogistan:

A man who found an American car he liked -- until they canceled the model (no worries though, he could always buy a big truck!)

Another person who drives German cars -- because they never break on him, not after years of driving.

A prominent writer for the site who hasn't driven American for 30 years because they suck -- and would only buy American as a masochistic last ditch to save the industry

On and on and on.

The question isn't how can we save the American auto industry. The question is; how can we save them from themselves?

An Evening with Mr. Campbell

2008-12-06T07:57:00.007-05:00

His Name is BruceWednesday night, the roomie and I went to see My Name is Bruce at the Sundance Cinema in yuppie Hilldale. Afterward, there was a Q&A session with Mr. Bruce Campbell himself, making it quite the special moviegoing occasion.

First, a little about the film: My Name is Bruce is a satirical horror-comedy, a style/genre that has gained a lot of visibility and credibility since the groundbreaking Shaun of the Dead. (Dark Reel, another great example of this trend, was the big winner at The Dark Carnival film festival this year.)

Of the three, Bruce is probably the lightest in tone and the least 'serious'. Semi-autobiographical, the film shows an exasperated and impoverished B-Movie star (Campbell) struggling to get through the days, succumbing to despair, debauchery and truly grotesque amounts of cheap whiskey, until a deseprate young fan unleashes an ancient Chinese war god on his town and seeks Campbell out to save everyone (just like he does in the movies).

The movie is quite snarky and biting when it comes to the issue of obsessive fans, which made it all the more interesting to be paired with a Q&A session sure to attract... lots of Bruce Campbell's more obsessive fans. The whole experience could get pretty 'meta', as the roommate would say (and did, if I recall correctly).

Besides Bruce Campbell, the movie is mostly full of new faces/unknowns, with the exception of Ted Raimi, who plays three different roles (including a potentially dicey Chinese-American stereotype by the name of Wing). Despite being a movie that gives the fans a hard time, it's loaded with fan-pleasing cameos from previous Bruce Campbell movies (and Sam Raimi pictures) in the Evil Dead trilogy, some of whose characters... explicitly talk about their previous roles in these other movies.

So you've got a bit of a snake eating its own tail thing.

Anyway, long story short, Bruce, in Bruce, has to get over his self-loathing and despondency to, in half-assed fashion, save a small town from an inept monster (Guan-Di, who is supposedly based on an actual Chinese war god/legend, who, and this is critical to the plot... was also the God of Bean Curd. Right.)

(Also of note is the movie's use of music; not unlike Dead and Breakfast, yet another great horror-comedy, Bruce features a number of plot-advancing songs and musical numbers where cast members directly address the audience.)

The end result is a hilarious, nonsensical, rambling, raving movie, bouncing from one scene to the next, never taking itself too seriously, and always giving you a chance to laugh. It's difficult to describe it any more precisely than that; this is what I sometimes call a 'cotton-candy' movie... it goes by so fast, and you enjoy it thoroughly, but it sort of melts/disappears into your memory after the fact.

(I will say that Mr. Campbell must be incredibly self-confident to make a movie so much at his own expense. Then again, this is a man who proudly refers to himself as a B-movie actor.)

After the movie, Campbell came out and took questions for quite a while, and he is incredibly funny and quick in person. Sometimes the questioners were pretty snarky themselves, and he always took it with humility, without ever being a pushover.

For instance, someone asked him about whether he was doing the Old Spice commercials just for the money (he said of course he was, that they paid very well and he'd rub 'that smelly crap' all over himself for the cash). Another person asked if there were any movies he wished he'd never done, which led Campbell to play a game with the audience, where he'd turn his back and people could yell out movies he'd acted in that they'd like refunds for.

He couldn't even get turned around before someone mentioned Congo.

Campbell readily admitted that Congo, as well as some of his other movies, were unwatchable; he noted that Congo had such an impressive pedigree that no one thought it would suck when he signed up though, featuring as it did many of Steven Spielberg's technical collaborators, based on a book by then-megahit author Michael Crichton, etc. "They just forgot to hire a director!" according to Campbell.

At the same time, when he felt that someone was being unfair (like when an audience rudely asked whether he did Burn Notice just for the money, a show that he's actually quite proud of), he was willing to fight back (that particular jerk got called, well... a 'jerk', by Mr. Campbell. Rightly so too. There's a thing called etiquette in these situations).

He talked at length about the process of making the movie (the entire fictional town was built as a backlot on his Oregon property), casting and directing a small budget film, (Ted Raimi is great because he works so cheap for example, or the horrors that can befall a small cast, say from poison oak in a hastily built mountain town), the difficulties of working in Hollywood, demand for making new versions/sequels of your past successes, and the like. At times it almost seemed like he had a rehearsed answer for everything (which led an audience member to ask if he in fact had any more ready made answers to common questions, which was a funny moment that didn't phase him in the least).

Still, even for topics that he could never have anticipated (like a lunatic woman who thinks that Madison in the summer is as hot as Miami, or a man who repeatedly tried to pick a fight between Campbell and Ron Perlman, who is replacing him as the lead in a Bubba Ho-Tep sequel), he was never rattled or distracted, and showed a great deal of patience. It was one of the best personal appearances I've ever seen, and all the more noteworthy because he had originally only been scheduled to do one session that evening, but had his schedule literally quadrupled after they added shows to meet demand. (It must be nice to be popular though, and Campbell thought it was hilarious that My Name is Bruce beat the pants off of Clint Eastwood's high-brow Changeling movie, starring Angelina Jolie, in per-screen take thanks to his fans).

All in all it was a great evening, and shocking in that the theatre didn't charge one thin dime extra for the special, sold-out shows with Q&A sessions either. Thus, their normally somewhat elevated ticket prices became a fantastic bargain; I honestly expected, for the privilege of being in a small theatre, seeing the local premiere of a movie with the star/director doing a talk afterward, that there'd be some sort of surcharge, if not a hefty fee. I appreciate the lack of venality on Sundance's part, and it garners a lot of good will from me.

(Which could be the goal, for all I know. If so, it's smart business; there are a lot of indie theatres in this town, but Sundance is really starting to stand out with its customer friendly atmosphere.)

I heartily recommend that people see My Name is Bruce, either on DVD or in the theatre if they can. It joins an impressive list of movies that, whether on their own or through venues like The Dark Carnival, show us that horror movies don't have to be restricted to big budget cruelty porn ala Hostel, or low-IQ direct to dvd slasher/rubber suit flicks.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.

Who knows; maybe his next movie can show at The Dark Carnival itself. I can dream, at any rate. (Don't fuck this up if you get the chance, Dr. Calamari, you squid bastard)

Stupid on the Radio

2008-12-03T12:17:00.006-05:00

Advertising Your DesperationSo, ever since I moved to Madison I listen to a lot of Progressive Talk Radio. Hence, I get to hear a lot of radio advertising. At the same time, I haven't had television in three or four months now, so I've pretty much completely gone through detox when it comes to television ads. I can't say for sure if that influences me or not, but radio advertising strikes me as... profoundly weird.

Weird, and largely stupid.

First, the weird and good: the local casino-running, Whitey-fleecing Native American tribe, the Ho-Chunk, they advertise on liberal radio a lot. The way they do it is really cute: they produce faux news, or perhaps, depending on your perspective, real-news, segments, in the style of the CNN Radio updates that run at the top of the hour, and put them on the air as the Ho-Chunk Radio News Network or something like that. They do one segment a week, promoting some activity, new business, or cause, always of course in a pro-Ho-Chunk light. It's slick but not overproduced, and actually fun to listen to, even though their projects have nothing to do with my life per se. They never push their gambling/entertainment directly, it's always something greenie or lefty friendly, like how they're remodeling a building to use less power, or how on their latest, ahem, entertainment venue (conveniently up near the Canadian border so that they can fleece International Whitey I suppose), they took pains to preserve the wetlands surrounding the new site. Sometimes it's about a chariable effort or something else along those lines as well. You get the idea.

Almost everything else is... sad. Local ads tend to be folksy and ridiculously homespun. I love the ads for a local clothing retailer, Fair Indigo, that go on and on about how wonderfully worker-friendly and blah blah blah they are... but the store is situated in the Hilldale outdoor shopping complex, a soulless, completely yuppie, ultra-high end, ultra-pricey district, one of those monstrous planned retail abominations.

(Though the roomie and I will be going there tonight, as their seemingly soulless indie theatre is hosting Bruce Campbell and his latest flick. They're expensive for a theatre, and way too shiny, but if they're willing to rein in the ostentatiousness and lure Mr. Campbell into town, perhaps they at least aren't mercenary yuppies to the core. Though you should see the mall they're located in, oy.)

At any rate, the local places are all very pricey, very yuppie joints. Three thousand dollar mattresses are a regular item, as are futons that cost more than a good used car, or jewelry that promises to assuage your guilt by selling 'non-conflict' diamonds (there's no such thing, as diamonds are basically untraceable and fungible; it's like saying there's non-conflict oil).

Then you have the various liberal hosts whoring their sponsor's products, which leads to some rather embarassing commercials, where female hosts have to peddle 'age-defying' cream, or ridiculous psuedo-hybrid cars from GM, or spam marketing software for small business, etc. Products that are, in short, insulting to their audience or compromise their objectivity and ideological views. Icky.

The worst though, the *worst*, are the commericals on the radio for radio itself. There's one that the station runs as part of some radio solidarity deal, with lines rhapsodizing about how 'if radio is heard here, radio is heard everywhere' and the like. My favorite is one with a line about a girl 'longing to hear that beautiful song' or something like that. The other day I couldn't take it and started yelling 'SHE SHOULD BUY AN MP3 PLAYER SO SHE CAN LISTEN TO IT NOW!'

The ultimate atrocity are the ads for HD Radio though. HD Radio, for those who haven't heard, is a wedge issue devised by Clear Channel to attempt to kill their Satellite Radio competitor, Sirus/XM, amongst other things.

Not that Sirus/XM needs help with that one.

Any way, these commercials actively suggest you buy your relatives and friends HD radios for Christmas, which it admits they do not want, instead of buying them gifts they might want, or putting any thought into an original gift of your own. There's one where it says that some relative who's a cat lover should get an HD radio, not the cat stuff she wants, because, well, she has too much cat stuff already.

The best is one that says that you have a sister or something who reads. Instead of getting her another gift certificate for a bookstore (or heaven forfend, a book yourself), buy her an HD radio! People who like books LOVE the radio, they say; "It's a medical fact."

Argh. Soulless hypercommercialism, insultingly packaged, ineptly delivered, polluting what is supposed to be an oasis against the stupid outside.

Well done.

Thankstaking

2008-11-29T04:17:00.005-05:00

A New TraditionInspired by Jeffrey Rowland, of Overcompensating (see comics here, here, and here, as well as the current frontpage comic (for Thursday, Nov. 27th)) this year the roommate and I created our own turkey-day celebration.

Our holiday differs from the traditional Thanksgiving in two important respects: One: it's actually fun (as opposed to something most people dread), and Two: It doesn't attempt to whitewash one of the world's most successful genocides.

The fact that we have to face as a society is that Thanksgiving, as a holiday, is really fucked up. The core story has been turned into a legendary symbol of peace and tolerance, and is used as an annual ritual, both to assuage white guilt and forcibly bond families together over gluttony. This is a holiday based on excessive eating, on gratuitous travel, and on the fetishization of the family.

Don't misunderstand; I'm not saying everyone who travels to see their families on Thanksgiving is a self-deluded glutton suffering from white guilt. But collectively, it's a fair description. Millions of Americans travel hundreds of millions of miles to see people they don't particularly care for once a year, eat food they don't particularly like, recall a hagiographic version of a long ago historical event of dubious import as a more pleasant symbol of what really happened in the history of this nation, and then go home. As a bonus, they might spend hours on the couch, watching football, or a parade featuring corporate advertisements blown up to the size of a Japanese movie monster.

Some quick historical correction:

--The Pilgrims were a cult with missionary ambitions. Their leaders were also corrupt schemers and cheats.
--Squanto, the friendly Indian guide who conveniently knew English? It's true, he did speak the language... because he had been captured as a slave years before and taken to Europe.
--The friend Indians they settled near? The Wampanoag? They were less friendly and more decimated by plague and unable to resist -- most likely that old friend of the Native American, and ally to white european conquest, Smallpox.

Though, for what it's worth, the Pilgrims did negotiate for their land, and apparently, according to the History Channel, they did have a celebratory meal. So, there you go. One good day in the history of the conquest of North America.

Hence, Thankstaking, a new, inclusive holiday, with new traditions drawn from a healthy fear and respect for Whitey, plus the desire to have actual fun.

Thankstaking Day Celebration
First, Thankstaking is held the day before Thanksgiving. This is to throw Whitey off the scent, so that, if he does find out about your gathering, he will show up too late to steal it. (Future Thankstakings may have to be rotated to different days on or around Thanksgiving -- Whitey is crafty and may figure out the deception eventually.)

For Thankstaking, you only invite people you actually want to spend time with. There is no obligation to spend all day hanging out with your crazy bible-thumping relatives.

Thankstaking day is casual dress. You don't have to wear that itchy sweater that your Grandmother gave you last year, just to keep the peace. Thankstaking day is a low-stress holiday.

On Thankstaking, you may prepare a turkey meal, or any other sort of food you wish, but gluttony is right out. Make a comfortable amount of food for the people you wish to serve; the idea that you have to cook an enormous bird so that you can have two weeks of unhygienic leftovers sitting in the fridge? Leave that to Whitey.

Thankstaking is a secular holiday. No need to worry about saying grace, or finding a common religious ground to organize the meal around. This is about having fun, not starting interfaith warfare. (We can invent another holiday for that)

Finally, Thankstaking entertainment. Skip the football, the parades, the boring, hypercommercial stuff. Instead, for Thankstaking, select the movie in your library that contains the most dead Whitey. Our selection this year was Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead (unrated director's cut too, extra gory). Bonus with this film: Whitey die of a horrible plague.

Extra bonus for me: It takes place largely in Wisconsin.

This is merely a suggested movie, there are a number of good choices. The important thing is, for one day at least, let some fictional Whitey receive their karmic just desserts, in a friendly atmosphere that everyone can enjoy.

Now you know how to celebrate Thankstaking. Enjoy!

(PS: I know I shouldn't use wikipedia so much, but this information is already common knowledge, and I read most of it already in a hardcopy of National Geographic that I still have lying around somewhere. In future I will work harder to avoid The Wiki Cult)

Time Keeps Slipping

2008-11-29T04:16:00.002-05:00

OopsI meant to start daily posting at the start of the month, again, but things kept getting in the way. I suppose if I really intend to use this space for writing I need to make a rule that I put up at least one post a day.

So that's going to be the plan. I'm putting this down in writing to try and shame myself into actually doing it from now on.

Heh. Guilt trip.

Tonight, Tonight

2008-11-05T00:11:00.004-05:00

Believe! I wouldn't have thought I could be this happy about an Obama victory, to be honest. I never liked him much. He was my third choice in the primaries... a distant third.

Quite frankly, his optimism and enthusiasm doesn't jibe well with a hardcore cynic like myself. Humanists rarely have the luxury of hope, I think; when the human race is all you have, disappointment is your constant companion.

But, tonight? At least a little bit? It's hard not to feel what the Obama people are feeling. It's kind of nice. Tomorrow is the first day of a long four years, a constant battle to stop Republican dirty tricks and backsliding.

But tonight? I keep coming back to the same Smashing Pumpkins song (hence the title).

Time is never time at all
You can never ever leave....without leaving a piece of youth
And our lives are forever changed
We will never be the same
The more you change the less you feel

Believe, believe in me, believe
Believe that life can change
That you're not stuck in vain
We're not the same, we're different tonight
Tonight, so bright
Tonight

And you know you're never sure
But you're sure you could be right
If you held yourself up to the light
And the embers never fade in your city by the lake
The place where you were born

Believe, believe in me, believe
Believe in the resolute urgency of now
And if you believe there's not a chance tonight
Tonight, so bright
Tonight

We'll crucify the insincere tonight
We'll make things right, we'll feel it all tonight
We'll find a way to offer up the night (Tonight)
The indescribable moments of your life (Tonight)
The impossible is possible tonight
Believe in me as I believe in you
Tonight.....

Last Minute Updates

2008-08-01T22:17:00.004-04:00

Could Be A WhileBasically, we're in the process of the eternal move that wouldn't die, and we're heading from the extended stay hotel we've been residing in to a 'Luxury Corporate Apartment'.

The problem, as relates to the blog, is that the new apartment does not, as it turns out, have working air conditioning.

Which was a surprise for us.

See, it's a two bedroom, two bathroom 'duplex', but the place has precisely one window AC unit in the ground floor living room. Which makes it rather hopelessly overworked.

Now, my PC runs too hot as it is, so, most likely, I won't be able to set it up in the new place, or if I can set it up in the aforementioned living room, may not be able to use it for much of the day.

So I'm going to make a couple of last minute additions to the blog before what will probably be another hiatus.

First, the graphical tweaking of the site continues. On advice from the great and powerful Roommate/Oz, I've moved the site off the white background to a more eye relaxing gray scheme, with a Mars-friendly color scheme for the text.

I'm not completely happy with it yet, because I'm a perfectionist, but it's coming along.

Secondly, and I meant to mention this earlier in the week, I discovered the answer to the Pius XI shirt mystery: it's from a local Catholic school!

Seriously. There's a Catholic school in Milwaukee named after the Fascist Pope. Granted, it was originally named in 1929, when his disastrous dealmaking had yet to bring shame to the church and death to so many, but still. You'd think the school would have the decency to change the name, so as to cease honoring such a... dubious... historical figure.

Alas, it appears not.

There has been a lot of interesting sciency news this week. Water on Mars, Ethane on Titan (a huge lake of it in fact), all very promising.

New research into a magic pill to make you healthy with no hard work; apparently it may work utilizing some of the same chemical pathways as resveratrol.

Toby Keith, the famed country singer who hates him some arabs, has revealed that he loves him some lynching. I'm not shocked.

Dick Cheney apparently plotted to have US soldiers shot at to start a war with Iran under false pretenses.

What a whacko this man is.

Speaking of whackos, the Pentagon is using a multimillion dollar mobile theme park, aimed and marketed at children, in an attempt to recruit future soldiers.

Until recent protests, they were targeting boys as young as 13.

Gee, maybe we can just go back to Civil War standards, give them a drum kit and fake their age. After all, cannon fodder is cannon fodder, right?

Amoral scum. The ACLU is on the case, pointing out that this scheme violates a 2002 treaty on child soldiers that we ratified.

Ha! Silly international law, getting in the way of our bloodletting..

That's about it for now. More when, and if, I can get the PC going in the new place.

Failing that, see you in a month or so.

Advancing the Frontiers of Free Speech

2008-07-30T09:08:00.003-04:00

A Lengthy Battle Against SavagesThis is an odd saga, to say the least.

It begins with an apparently faithful Catholic student by the name of Webster Cook, attending school at the University of Central Florida. Webster, it seems, wanted to show a (presumably) Non-Catholic friend a communion wafer, so he took it home to show a friend rather than eating it immediately.

Cook claims he planned to consume it, but first wanted to show it to a fellow student senator he brought to Mass who was curious about the Catholic faith.

"When I received the Eucharist, my intention was to bring it back to my seat to show him," Cook said. "I took about three steps from the woman distributing the Eucharist and someone grabbed the inside of my elbow and blocked the path in front of me. At that point I put it in my mouth so they'd leave me alone and I went back to my seat and I removed it from my mouth."

Source: WFTV.com

The story seems a bit odd, as he was apparently caught trying to take it out of the service and was confronted (he complains about physical force being used against him). A local tv station (in an admittedly inflammatory and biased article) suggests that he may have been protesting the fact that (and I thought this was odd) his PUBLIC UNIVERSITY has a CATHOLIC CHURCH on campus -- and uses public funds to support it.

A church leader was watching, confronted Cook and tried to recover the sacred bread. Cook said she crossed the line and that's why he brought it home with him.

"She came up behind me, grabbed my wrist with her right hand, with her left hand grabbed my fingers and was trying to pry them open to get the Eucharist out of my hand," Cook said, adding she wouldn't immediately take her hands off him despite several requests.

Diocese of Orlando spokeswoman Carol Brinati said she was not aware of anyone touching Cook. She released a statement Thursday: "... a Catholic Campus Ministry student representative filed a complaint with the Student Union regarding the behavior of the two young men. A Student Government Representative called Catholic Campus Ministry to apologize for this disruption."

Cook filed an official abuse complaint with UCF's student conduct court regarding the alleged physical force. Following that complaint, Brinati said church members filed their own official complaints of disruptive conduct. Punishment for either offense could result in suspension or expulsion.

"The church feels that I'm the problem here," Cook said. "The problem is actually that this is a publicly-funded religious institution. Through student government here, we fund them through an activity and service, so they're receiving student money."

Cook is upset more than $40,000 in student fees have been allocated to support religious organizations on campus for the 2008-2009 school year, according to student government records. He denied he is holding the Eucharist hostage to protest that support.

Source: WTFV

Because, as we all know, the Vatican is completely destitute.

At any rate, he managed to leave with the communion wafer/cracker though, and that, to my mind, would be that. If the church doesn't want him back, they always had the option of banning him. Big deal.

Well, to the good, faithful, and apparently radical Catholics of both the University and the United States, that most certainly was *not* that.

The Church decided to get in on the act, inflaming their local followers (knowing perfectly well the inevitable results):

Regardless of the reason, the Diocese says its main concern is to get the Eucharist back so it can be taken care of properly and with respect. Cook has been keeping the Eucharist stored in a plastic bag since last Sunday.

"It is hurtful," said Father Migeul Gonzalez with the Diocese. "Imagine if they kidnapped somebody and you make a plea for that individual to please return that loved one to the family."

Gonzalez said the Diocese is willing to meet with Cook and help him understand the importance of the Eucharist in hopes of him returning it. The Diocese is dispatching a nun to UCF's campus to oversee the next mass, protect the Eucharist and in hopes Cook will return it.

Cook said he'd consider returning the Eucharist if he gets an apology and a meeting with the Bishop's office to discuss the Diocese's policy on physical force.

Gonzalez said intentionally abusing the Eucharist is classified as a mortal sin in the Catholic church, the most severe possible. If it's not returned, the community of faith will have to ask for forgiveness.

"We have to make acts of reparation," Gonzalez said. "The whole community is going to turn to prayer. We'll ask the Lord for pardon, forgiveness, peace, not only for the whole community affected by it, but also for [Cook], we offer prayers for him as well."

Source: WFTV

And thus, wrath was rained down upon this poor schmuck, with the full blessing of the local religious establishment.

They accused him of committing a 'hate crime'. They harassed him. They compared taking the cracker to torture, and kidnapping!They threatened his life... repeatedly. The ultra-right wing Catholic League hate group led a national campaign against this poor student. Here's Donohue trying to ruin the kid's life:

For a student to disrupt Mass by taking the Body of Christ hostage--regardless of the alleged nature of his grievance--is beyond hate speech. That is why the UCF administration needs to act swiftly and decisively in seeing that justice is done. All options should be on the table, including expulsion.

That's right, if you disagree with someone, forget reason, forget discussion, forget the law: just terrorize them.

Webster just wants all of this to go away. Especially now that he feels his life is in danger.

Source: Pharyngula

All because he didn't chew... a wafer.

Well, after a few days of terror and threats, the poor, humbled student returned his cracker, and begged for his life/forgiveness.

"I am returning the Eucharist to you in response to the e-mails I have received from Catholics in the UCF community," Cook wrote in a letter to the church. "I still want the community to understand that the use physical force is wrong, especially when based on assumptions. However, I feel it is unnecessary to cause pain for those who are not at fault in this situation."

Cook said some threatened to break into his dorm room to rescue the Eucharist. Brinati said the Diocese of Orlando didn't condone those threats, but was happy Cook had a change of heart and returned it.

Source: WFTV They didn't 'condone' those threats - but they sure didn't put a stop to them either.

Huh.

The oh-so-forgiving christian community continued with plans to ruin his life, but put the 'killing him' thing on the backburner, and the story started to die down. The University, for its part, started supplying ARMED GUARDS (presumably also at taxpayer expense) to the Church, to protect the poor, victimized wafer community.

Enter PZ Myers, well-known atheist/science blogger, who was shocked and disgusted at the raving mob trying to destroy, and possibly murder, this poor student. Whether a noisy protestor or apparently ignorant lapsed Catholic, his education, career, even life were now in the hands of the lunatic fringe. Myers thought this was outrageous.

So he came up with a simple plan:

So, what to do. I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There's no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I'm sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I'll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won't be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart.

Source: Pharyngula Yes, Myers determined that he would do to the wafer what this poor student never had: he would obtain one, maliciously, and desecrate it.

Needless to say, all hell broke loose. Again.

All of the regular readers have seen it — thousands of mindless comments by Catholics, demanding that no harm come to a cracker. My email is melting down with swarms of insults, threats, pleas, and promises of prayers because I threatened to violate one of their holy crackers. In my years of loud and often inflammatory blogging, it is the most impressive demonstration of mass lunacy I have ever seen.

Never mind that the Catholic League demands that I be fired, thousands of Catholics write to me demanding I be kicked out of the university immediately, and that they send me death threats, both the explicit kind and the vaguely menacing kind. Let's not forget Webster Cook, who started this all by simply walking back to his seat with a cracker, and now faces censure and possible expulsion from his university. Oh, those Catholics sure are forbearing and tolerant.

And since I mentioned yesterday that I was taking my oldest son to the movies, these good Catholics have leapt to the opportunity. Since I'm not demonstrating any fear over their threats against me, well hey, let's try a new target! KJ Atkins of Bellarmine University thinks cowardly warnings against my family might be effective.

"You fool, the vengeance for your sacrilege will not be . exhausted against you, but it will be carried out on your child. Wait and see."

Source: Pharyngula

Well, apparently Myers finally got his hands on a wafer/cracker, and did, in fact, carry out his 'threat' against an inanimate object. Despite stalkings, death threats against himself and his family, and, yes, another hate campaign from the Catholic League:

OK, time for the anticlimax. I know some of you have proposed intricate plans for how to do horrible things to these crackers, but I repeat…it's just a cracker. I wasn't going to make any major investment of time, money, or effort in treating these dabs of unpleasantness as they deserve, because all they deserve is casual disposal. However, inspired by an old woodcut of Jews stabbing the host, I thought of a simple, quick thing to do: I pierced it with a rusty nail (I hope Jesus's tetanus shots are up to date). And then I simply threw it in the trash, followed by the classic, decorative items of trash cans everywhere, old coffeegrounds and a banana peel. My apologies to those who hoped for more, but the worst I can do is show my unconcerned contempt.

Source: Pharyngula

Will this be the end of the saga?

Doubt it. Myers implores his readers, and the world, to exercise a bit of their own independent judgment and reason:

By the way, I didn't want to single out just the cracker, so I nailed it to a few ripped-out pages from the Qur'an and The God Delusion. They are just paper. Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity's knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.

Source: Ibid

When I first read about this mess, back when Myers made his original 'threat', I thought it might be a bit over the top. Not all Catholics are jerks, I thought; I wouldn't take quite the same tack.

Though, if you could get a hold of a communion wafer from that SPECIFIC Church, the one that tried to rouse a violent mob to terrify someone into obeying them (or failing that, have the person killed).... well, that would be a very different story.

That particular church had it coming, I thought.

Having seen the sheer volume of hate, venom, and terror that people like Bill Donohue spew at Myers, the threats against his family, the attempts to run him out of public life on a rail because he protests the victimization of a college student, at a public university, by the most powerful church in the world...

Well, it's hard not to root for Myers after all. If it comes down to defending a loudmouth or a violent, disgusting thug like Donohue, I'll side with the loudmouth anytime, anywhere.

PS: One last note: the student who started this whole mess? He's still going through a living hell.

The University of Central Florida's student Senate voted to impeach one of its own late Thursday night -- the student who sparked a firestorm of controvery after taking off from a Catholic Mass on campus with a sacred Communion wafer in his pocket.

All but two of the 35 senators present voted to impeach Webster Cook, but the action did not result in his automatic removal from office.

...

Although the Senate could kick Cook off the student government's legislative body, it does not have the authority to suspend or expel Cook from the university. That could happen only if he's found to have violated serious conduct code violations in student court. UCF is barred by federal law from confirming whether any complaints have been filed against Cook. But the statements included in the affidavit refer to a formal complaint against Cook by the campus ministry for disrupting the service.

Source: Orlando Sentinel.com Blog

That'll teach him to mistake a public university for an institution of higher learning and intellectual freedom.

McCain Atlas!

2008-07-29T22:46:00.004-04:00

Much has been made of John McCain's geographic knowledge, but how does Grampy McSame really see the world?Much has been made of John McCain's geographic knowledge, but how does Grampy McSame really see the world?

Luckily for my non-existent loyal readers, I have a source* deep within the McCain campaign, who sent me this page out of a top-secret foreign policy document, the John McCain Atlas of the World (2008 Edition).

Now you too can be a globe-straddling master of geopolitics, just like Senator John McCain.

(Click either thumbnail for full-size image)
Enjoy.

*Also non-existent

Random Observation

2008-07-29T08:44:00.005-04:00

T-Shirt EditionSo I was coming up from the laundry room in our hotel this morning, and I saw one of the gaggle of kids who currently inhabit the place coming down in the elevator, wearing a tie-dye t-shirt that said 'Pius XI'.

I'm no Catholic, but even I could recognize the format for the name of a Pope, and further, this particular papal name stuck in my head for some reason, so I decided to look it up once I got back to my room. After all, if they're making t-shirts for kids featuring the guy, someone thinks he's pretty important, right?

Hitting the Wikipedia, I remembered where I knew the name: Pius XI was the Fascist Pope!

Pius XI was the pope who traded the Church's credibility and moral authority to first Mussolini (in exchange for land, statehood for the Vatican, and a theocratic Italian state), and then HITLER (again, for various special favors!) Quoth the Wikipedia:

Pius XI aimed to end the long breach between the papacy and the Italian government and to gain recognition once more of the sovereign independence of the Holy See. This goal led to one of his signature achievements, the signing in 1929 of the Lateran Treaty with the Italian government and the establishment of an independent Vatican City State.

Most of the Papal States had been seized by the forces of King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy (1861 – 1878) in 1860 at the foundation of the modern unified Italian state, and the rest, including Rome, in 1870. The Papacy and the Italian Government had been at loggerheads ever since: the Popes had refused to recognise the Italian state's seizure of the Papal States, instead withdrawing to become prisoners in the Vatican, and the Italian government's policies had always been anti-clerical. Now Pius XI thought a compromise would be the best solution.

To bolster his own new regime, Mussolini was also eager for an agreement. After years of negotiation, in 1929, the Pope supervised the signing of the Lateran Treaties with the Italian government. According to the terms of the first treaty, Vatican City was given sovereignty as an enclave of the city of Rome in return for the Vatican relinquishing its claim to the former territories of the Papal States. Pius XI thus became a head of state (albeit the smallest state in the world), the first Pope who could be termed as such since the Papal States fell after the unification of Italy in the 19th century. A second treaty, the concordat with Italy, recognised Roman Catholicism as the official state religion of Italy, gave the Church power over marriage law in Italy (ensuring the illegality of divorce), and restored Catholic religious teaching in all schools. In return, the clergy would not take part in politics. A third treaty provided financial compensation to the Vatican for the loss of the Papal States.

Source: Wikipedia (article on Pius XI)

That's not all, of course. Mussolini wasn't the only waste of human skin that Pius XI was willing to sell the soul of the church to for money and political power:

Pius XI was eager to negotiate concordats with any country that was willing to do so, thinking that written treaties were the best way to protect the Church's rights against governments increasingly inclined to interfere in such matters. Twelve concordats were signed during his reign with various types of governments, including some German state governments, and with Austria. When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933 and asked for a concordat, Pius XI accepted. Negotiations were conducted on his behalf by Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who later became Pope Pius XII (1939 – 1958). The Reichskonkordat was signed by Pacelli and by the German government in June 1933, and included guarantees of liberty for the Church, independence for Catholic organisations and youth groups, and religious teaching in schools.

Source: Wikipedia (Pius XI article, subarticle on German relations)

Good old Pius XI came to regret these treaties later, when the Fascists showed less inclination to follow some clauses than others. Apparently he was also unhappy with the whole 'wipe out the Jews' aspect to the Fascist worldview.

Not unhappy enough to give back the money, land, or political independence he obtained by aiding the Fascist ascendency to power, of course. In fact, even after the shame of World War II, his successor (remember, the man who actually negotiated with the Nazis) got the gifts from Mussolini written into the new Italian constitution... including the official theocracy clause!

The Lateran Agreements were incorporated into the Constitution of the Italian Republic in 1947.

In 1984 an agreement was signed, revising the concordat. Among other things, it ended the Church's position as the state-supported religion of Italy.

Source: Wikipedia (Lateran Treaties)

That's right. These odious agreements with a bloodthirsty madman were dragged into the modern era by the Church, which, it seems, still hadn't learned when to quit. For my part I can't believe Italy was an official theocracy until the 80s, but hey. They are pretty backward by European standards (just look at their government).

So there you have it. Pius XI, Fascist loving Nazi-enabler, is somehow deemed, in 2008, to be worthy of immortalization. On t-shirts for children.

What's next, Torquemada bibs and pacifiers?

Uggh.

Spectaculathon

2008-07-27T18:54:00.012-04:00

A Night at the TheatreSo the roommate and I went to the inaugural performance of the shiny new Epic Theatre Company here in Madison on Saturday night, where they were performing "The Brothers Grimm Spectaculathon", and had a pretty good time, I must say.

First, the venue: the play was held in local software giant Epic's large convention building (nerdily named Voyager Hall -- everything there is nerdily named though), set up in a flexible hallway space rather than one of their theatre/convention halls, interestingly enough. Set design was extremely sparse and consisted of a small stage, black backdrop curtains and a sound booth in the rear. The audience sat on about 100, 150 portable chairs, comfortable models though, not the lousy wooden folding chairs you often get at community/school/church functions.

Secondly, the work: The Spectaculathon is a humorous mish-mash/retelling of (some) of the (apparently) 209 separate fairy tales collected by The Brothers Grimm. No wonder Fables never runs out of material...

The play tries to cover all the highlights, along with a mixture of the lesser known works, often contrasting the original versions of the stories both with their better known pop-culture derivatives (i.e., Disney) and with modern storytelling sensibilities as well (Why is Little Red Riding Hood so stupid anyway? And why do people keep going into the dark, dangerous, monster infested woods?).

The cast and crew were, according to the playbill as well as personal observation, a group of talented amateurs rather than professionals, which often made the resulting entertainment more rather than less impressive. In particular, the actor who played one of two Narrators, as well as two separate Grandmothers, is a man named Sean Mikles, whose bio indicates he was last seen on stage as an eight-year old.

Another of the male leads, who plays several incarnations of Prince Charming and, at one point, the entire principal cast of Cinderella (seriously), was also very quick-witted and memorable. I'd have his name here as well, but the playbill lists everyone other than the narrators as playing 'Various', which doesn't help to narrow it down (tsk tsk).

Spectaculathon was presented as a two-act event, and so, with a short intermission the entire thing was over in about two hours. This first play was free, proving that the Epic Theatre people intend to use the time-honored marketing strategy of drug dealers everywhere... usually a smart move.

I look forward to their next project.

A note on the audience, however: we went to the evening show on Saturday, in no small part, to attempt to avoid the matinee experience, but alas it was in vain. Small children were brought, audience members loudly nattered on during the show, and those of us in the back had to strain to hear during some of the first act over one child in particular who Just. Would. Not. Shut. Up.

Uggh.

Going out to public events is seemingly less enjoyable every year. I can't begin to describe the number of events I've had ruined by these people, almost all families with small children, who insist on dragging their brats along to every function, no matter the time of day or appropriateness of the subject matter. Society just doesn't impose any limits on these people and their spawn, and it's getting to the point where, honestly, you'd have more fun staying at home.

Which is a shame, because then we'd all have to miss out on things like the Epic Theatre Company. Just to satisfy the whims of a selfish few who insist on 'having it all'.

As a civilization, we really have to do something about that. If all culture and entertainment is destined to be reduced to a chatoic mass of screaming, wailing, sour-milk-smelling children, I suggest we just spike the communal Kool-Aid and get it over with now.

With Friends Like These (Part I)...

2008-07-24T19:38:00.012-04:00

Honestly, I don't know why we bother.I've been listening to a lot of the local 'Progressive' radio station since we moved up here to Madison. Partially this is due to my insatiable craving for political news and information, but it's just as largely being driven by the fact that Madison lacks a single listenable contemporary radio station (or even, from what I can tell, a better-than-average classic rock station). Seriously. It's pretty awful up here. I thought I had it bad in Indiana.... oy.

But what Madison lacks in music, it seemed to make up for in talk radio; we have a dedicated left-wing talk station. That should kill a lot of drive-time, right?

Actually, yes. In particular I love the Stephanie Miller show, which is on in the mornings when I drive the roommate to work, or ride with her so I can take the car for the day. It's good enough I actually listen to it outside of the car, something I never do with radio. Rachel Maddow's show in the evenings is solid, but it's just a good lefty news program, and not on at a time that I'm typically in the car, so I rarely catch it.

The other stuff though...

I keep having to give up on these guys for being, well, colossal morons. First up is Thom Hartmann, who has a show that airs here in Madison in the late afternoon. Hartmann is almost a bad caricature of the mild-spoken ex-Hippy. Every show seems to revolve around some kooky, feel-good alternative social theory and how it applies to the world today, and how, naturally enough, it's better than the existing models and, if implemented, would lead to sunshine, lollipops, happiness, rainbows and the like.

Seems harmless enough, right?

I put the radio on as I went to pick up the roommate on Wednesday, and good old mild-mannered Thom was having an actual argument with a right-wing troll who had called in to attempt to pigeonhole him on immigration issues. The right-winger had the usual 'I hate Brown People' approach to the topic, as you might expect, and was trying to cast Thom as an irredeemable leftist.

That was all part of the usual song and dance; hardly surprising. What was surprising was Hartmann's response; the problem with immigration, in fact, IS that the lousy brown people are taking all of our jobs!

Seriously. First, Hartmann went off on a fairly deranged rant about how the 'Visa Program' was letting a bunch of 'Philipino nurses' and 'Indian engineers' into the country, where they took skilled American jobs.

Hartmann thinks this is unforgivable, and he has a simple solution: Don't let them in. Slash the program (btw, he's referring to the H1-B skilled guest worker program; he didn't seem to know the name of the type of Visa he hates so while on the air) and build a bunch of colleges!

Ok.... at this point, you might well be asking yourself if Thom Hartmann is aware of how long it takes to establish a college, erect the structures, employ the staff, recruit the students, and then, of course, educate them in a full course of study. It takes an already established university *years* to get a new degree granting program underway -- it's a complete mystery how Hartmann thinks a slew of all-new, dedicated colleges will be formed, overnight, to service the fields he leaves drastically short of workers (or so he believes -- see actual figures on H1-B Visas below). Even if the schools did open in a day, there would still be the matter of recruiting a student body, educating them, and placing them in jobs, which will take further years, assuming, of course, that American students even want to earn these degrees, take these jobs, etc.

Hartmann estimates, furiously, that 'a million' people a year enter America a year to steal the high-skilled jobs from poor, long-suffering Americans. A million!

Well... not so much.

The Department of Homeland Security approved about 132,000 H-1B visas in 2004 and 117,000 in 2005.

Source: Wikipedia

Ok, so Hartmann has exaggerated the scope of the 'problem'... by an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE. Still, 100k jobs, that's a lot of work going to foreigners, right?

Not so much.

These days, the economy must add from 150,000 to 200,000 jobs every month to keep the unemployment rate from rising, economists say.

Source: The New York Times (2003)

So, he's talking about fewer jobs being taken, in total, *annually*, than the number of new jobs that have to be created, in a single month, just to keep pace with the number of additional people entering the job market.

This is an urgent problem for Mr. Hartmann. I wonder why...

Let's return to the groups isolated for derision by Mr. Hartmann: Indian engineers and Philippino nurses.

In fact, while people from India do make up 25% of the H1-B Visa population, Europeans make up 27%. The Phillipines, as a country, aren't even in the top ten. India is number 1, sure. Who's Number 2? The United Kingdom. Number 3? Canada!

Source: Wikipedia (from Yearbook of US Immigration Statistics, 2005, Department of Homeland Security)

Funny how Thom doesn't pick on those pesky Eurotrash and Maple-huggers taking our jobs, isn't it. Instead, he focuses on... dark-skinned brown people.

Huh.

It gets better though; he has a plan to deal with the illegal immigration issue too.

See, when Thom lived in Germany, he had to go through a draconian process to become a legal guest worker. It took, he said, three months, and without the state-issued ID it was more or less impossible to get a job in Germany.

Hartmann wants to do the same thing for America... to prevent those illegals from taking our jobs.

Think about it. Hartmann's solution to illegal immigration is to put all undocumented immigrants out of work.

Sigh. Where to begin with this crap...

There are millions of illegal immigrants in this country. How many is, of course, impossible to precisely pin down. Estimates range from 8-20 million; middle of the road figures peg it at about 12 million.

The Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington, estimates 11.5 million to 12 million "unauthorized migrants" live in the US today. It bases its numbers on the "Current Population Survey," a monthly assessment of about 50,000 households jointly conducted by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau.

Source: The Christian Science Monitor

Thom Hartmann wants to make this entire population unemployable, forever. Presumably this means he wants to throw them out of the country; either that, or make them into Soylent Green.

But, you say, wouldn't throwing illegal immigrants out of the country en masse cause massive human suffering and economic devastation?

Yes. Yes it would.

The tiny northeast town was home to the nation's largest kosher meatpacker, which recently lost nearly half of its work force after a huge raid by immigration officials. The raid sent shockwaves through the town, which has served as a multicultural model.

Aaron Rubashkin, an Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, founded Agriprocessors in the town 20 years ago. The plant was turning out about half of the nation's kosher beef and chicken.

Slaughter operations are now down to one shift instead of three as the company scrambles for replacement workers. It is expected that many of them will be Mexican-Americans from Texas.

The plant brought diversity and prosperity to a town with three central streets and no stoplights. But after the raid, many here are wondering if the future of the town is in jeopardy. Some 2,300 people lived in Postville before the raid; about half of them were Hispanic

Source: NPR

This was one single raid. How many illegal immigrants did they detain for deportation based on this devastated town?

389.

389 out of 12 million. What did that look like, that drop out of the bucket, that teaspoon out of the ocean?

Washington, D.C. - Sister Kathy Thill of Waterloo said she feels like a stranger in her own country in the wake of a May 12 immigration raid in tiny Postville.

The Catholic nun has assisted immigrant families there following the detainment of 389 workers at the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant.

She is a member of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas who works with Latino families in Iowa.

"I am also a United States citizen who grew up believing that this is a democratic country in which the dignity of all people is respected and their rights protected," she said Tuesday at a news conference here, surrounded by members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

"This is not the country I experienced this past week."

...

The tension spreads beyond the Hispanic communities, she said.

Driving to Postville on Friday with a car full of donations, she said she got a call warning of possible checkpoints between Waterloo and Postville, and she wondered what might happen to her for delivering supplies.

"I suddenly felt like I was in a strange country," she said. "I didn't feel free."

The future of America, as presented by one Thom Hartmann.

389 down; 11,999,611 to go.

Outdated Links

2008-07-20T20:55:00.003-04:00

Repository of Broken Dreams, Etc.Last Blood, Chainmail Bikini, Creepy Carly, Brymstone, The Zombie Hunters, The War of Winds, Monty and Woolley, Menacing House

Foo

2008-07-20T16:10:00.000-04:00

This is Another TestThis is A Test As Well

Testing something.

2008-06-09T18:50:00.003-04:00

PreviewPost

Hiatus

2008-05-11T11:43:00.000-04:00

Various

It's been a while since I've posted anything here. Huh.

I meant to put something up a while ago; suffice it to say, things are very busy here at the Resistance, and between the ongoing move to the blasted dairy heath that is Wisconsin, teaching the roommate how to drive (something that, oddly enough, 95% of the people on the road never bothered to learn), packing, sorting, packing, sorting, tending to the seasonal needs of my army of plants, etc, it's been crazy.

So the blog is on hiatus. While it's off the accursed roommate is going to help with a shiny new art style, recoded template, and the like.

I also plan to start a blog for a certain comic eventually. Plus we're working on a secret project that will bring Western Civilization to its knees.

Keep an eye out for that one. It'll be hilarious.

In the meantime, I might make a sporadic post here or there. Who knows?

Until then.

JJS

Science Update

2008-04-20T14:10:00.002-04:00

I Have Nothing Interesting To Say Here

Ancient Swede
So there's a new World's Oldest Tree, which has taken the throne from those uppity Bristlecone Pines in America.

The world's oldest living tree on record is a nearly 10,000 year-old spruce that has been discovered in central Sweden, Umeaa University said on Thursday.

Researchers had discovered a spruce with genetic material dating back 9,550 years in the Fulu mountain in Dalarna, according to Leif Kullmann, a professor of Physical Geography at the university in northwestern Sweden.

That would mean it had taken root in roughly the year 7,542 BC.

"It was a big surprise because we thought until (now) that this kind of spruce grew much later in those regions," he said.

That is oooooooooooooold.

Don't expect intelligent commentary here. I just got up from a nap.

Apparently this tree is way older than they thought they had arrived here, and the article mentions something about them being climate change bellwethers, so I'm guessing what they mean is that the last ice age in Sweden ended earlier than they thought, or something. It's sparse on the details. Ancient history seems to be impacted by this lonely survivor, regardless.

Source: Raw Story

Cold
The coldest star ever found has been located. It's only 660 degrees at the surface -- cooler than Venus.

April 11, 2008 -- A dim, lonely, weakling star with the lowest stellar temperature yet recorded has been found just 40 light-years from Earth.

The brown dwarf star is between 15 and 30 times the mass of Jupiter and has a surface temperature of a mild 660 degrees Fahrenheit (350 Celsius) -- about the surface temperature of the planet Mercury at the equator and much cooler than the surface of Venus.

The spectacularly unspectacular object is of special interest because it falls right smack in the middle of the final frontier that divides mega-planets from the puniest stars. Stars in that realm theoretically qualify as an entirely new stellar type -- what's called a Y class dwarf.

The article mentions the possibility of even colder stars, stars perhaps cool enough to have liquid water in their atmospheres.

It's likely, says Burgasser, that as more of these even cooler dwarfs are found, there likely will be some that are a couple of hundred degrees cooler than CFBDS0059. That means any water in there atmospheres will condense into droplets of water vapor, which would make these dwarfs dramatically different than their L and T dwarf brothers.

In brown dwarf atmospheres, water is generally in gaseous state, while in giant planets it condenses into water ice. So an even cooler dwarf would truly be on the verge of being more of a hot, giant Jupiter than a star.

That's amazingly odd. Imagine if there is a star out there somewhere just warm enough to keep water liquid. You could have life as we know it living on a *star*.

Wacky.

Source: Discovery Channel News

RFI-Death
So an engineer who suffered through radiation therapy thought he had a better way to do it -- and it seems like he was on to something.

A promising new cancer treatment that may one day replace radiation and chemotherapy is edging closer to human trials.

Kanzius RF therapy attaches microscopic nanoparticles to cancer cells and then "cooks" tumors inside the body with harmless radio waves.

Based on technology developed by Pennsylvania inventor John Kanzius, a retired radio and TV engineer, the treatment has proven 100 percent effective at killing cancer cells while leaving neighboring healthy cells unharmed. It is currently being tested at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

“I don’t want to give people false hope,” said Dr. Steve Curley, the professor leading the tests, “but this has the potential to treat a wide variety of cancers.”

Modern cancer treatments like radiation and chemotherapy have proven remarkably effective at treating many cancers, especially in combination, but are plagued with toxic side effects. These treatments kill healthy cells as well as cancerous ones.

Kanzius RF therapy is noninvasive, and uses nontoxic radio waves combined with gold or carbon nanoparticles, which have a long history of medical use.

Essentially, you take nano-particles of gold, coat them in a chemical that only cancer cells absorb, then inject it. The cancer takes up the chemically coated gold. Then you blast the area of the body with a radio source.. the gold absorbs the radio waves, heats up, and kills whatever cells it's in. But if you had the right chemical, it's only inside cancer. Voila! Perfectly targeted radiation therapy.

Very nice.

Source: Wired

Chimeratech
I'd heard about a technique like this to create genetically modified animals but I guess this is the first time someone's thought about using it as a backdoor to cloning without Dolly-esque age symptoms.

The mice were made by inserting skin cells of an adult animal into early embryos produced by in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). Some of the resulting offspring were partial clones but some were full clones – just like Dolly.

Unlike the Dolly technique, however, the procedure is so simple and efficient that it has raised fears that it will be seized on by IVF doctors to help infertile couples who are eager to have their own biological children.

...

The experiments on mice demonstrated that it is now possible in principle to take a human skin cell, reprogramme it back to its embryonic state and then insert it into an early human embryo. The resulting child would share some of the genes of the person who supplied the skin tissue, as well as the genes of the embryo's two parents.

These offspring are chimeras – a genetic mix of two or more individuals – because some of their cells derive from the embryo and some from the skin cell. Technically, such a child would have three biological parents. Human chimeras occur naturally when two embryos fuse in the womb and such people are often normal and healthy. Dr Lanza says there is no reason to believe that a human chimera created by the new technique would be unhealthy.

Furthermore, studies on mice have shown that it is possible to produce fully cloned offspring that are 100 per cent genetically identical to the adult. This was achieved by using a type of defective mouse embryo with four sets of chromosomes instead of the normal two.

This "tetraploid" embryo only developed into the placenta of the foetus and when it was injected with a reprogrammed skin cell, the rest of the foetus developed from this single cell to become a full clone of the adult animal whose skin was used.

I fail to see the horror here. The clone would be genetically identical to their parent, or whoever donated the cells. So... what, exactly? Granted, you'll probably get some creepy Jim Jones/Koresh type making his own little Clone Army, but is that really substantially worse than the current situation, where they just marry a couple dozen 10-14 year old girls?

From a safety perspective I oppose using a technique like this on people until we have all the bugs worked out, of course. But I can't find any ethical reason per se to hate *the clones*. They'll just be additional people. Despite what sci-fi movies might say, they won't be any more soulless or murderous than the rest of us, or at least, their donor-parent.

Source: The Independent

Bollocks
Apparently the new CEO of Virgin Media doesn't understand either the law, or the proper method to do business.

Neil Berkett, the new CEO of Virgin Media (my ISP at home in London, along with BT) has announced that he considers Net Neutrality to be "a load of bollocks" and he's promised to put any website or service that won't pay Virgin a premium to reach its customers into the "Internet bus lane."

Cory Doctorow has started a campaign to switch from Verizon in response. Normally I think he's had a bit too much dandelion tea, but he's right on this issue. I'm just not sure it goes far enough.

See, telecoms are protected from being sued for what they host/serve on the basis of what's known as the Common Carrier provision. Essentially, the Supreme Court decided back in the days of big railroad that you were protected from lawsuits and a lot of regulation as to what you carried, as long as you carried cargo more or less impartially to all who asked and paid. This concept of an undiscerning, very low-barrier to entry transportation entity has been carried over to the telecoms, who can't be sued for, say, a mobster ordering a hit via cell phone, or a hacker using the net to breach a hospital's mainframe, just because they provide the service over which it was done.

Truthfully, until very recently, it was impossible to track that volume of information, so without common carrier it would have been legally impossible to run a telecom.

But here we have the big telcos who want to have it both ways; they want to be legally protected from their customers' actions, and they want to be able to regulate them too. That's just not kosher; you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you're in the business of regulating your customers and what they can access, then you should be liable for their crimes, infringement, what have you. Every mp3 downloaded, every stolen program or game, all of it, your liability.

I think the EFF or ACLU should sue any telco that steps over the line for any and all illegal activity on their network. If we bloody their noses, maybe they'll realize that the old way really is the best.

Sources: Boing Boing
Wikipedia

Upas
Another plant I want to own someday: the Upas tree.

Antiaris toxicaria (Upas or Ipoh) is an evergreen tree in the family Moraceae, native to southeastern Asia, from India and Sri Lanka east to southern China, the Philippines and Fiji; closely related species also occur in eastern Africa. It produces a highly poisonous latex, known in Java as "Upas", from the Javanese word for "poison".

...

The name of the upas tree became legendary from the mendacious account (professedly by one Foersch, who was a surgeon at Semarang in 1773) published in the London Magazine, December 1783, and popularized by Erasmus Darwin in Loves of the Plants (The Botanic Garden, pt. ii.). The tree was said to destroy all animal life within a radius of 15 miles or more.

Sadly it's apparently a large tree, so this will have to wait until my compound is complete.

Source: Wikipedia

Slither
This story's been going around, it even made it into Atomic Age humor last night.

EUGENE, Ore. -- A 12-foot snake attacked a female employee of a pet store, prompting assistance from police, firefighters and emergency personnel Thursday.

Sergeant Ryan Nelson had never tangled with a snake larger than a garter snake before Thursday.

All that changed, however, when he responded to a 911 call at 3:41 p.m. to find a woman in a Eugene pet store completely wrapped by a 12-foot Burmese python that was slowly constricting around her, police said.

Nelson saw the woman was in grave danger and feared for her life. But as he pulled out his knife in
preparation to save the woman, matters got more difficult.

She pleaded with Nelson not to injure the snake.

Long story short, everybody lives, though the snake loses a few teeth when they had to pry it off. This is very odd behavior for a constrictor -- they generally are very docile sorts, and don't even consider attacking anything too big to consume. The only way they have to attack something is to grapple with it, as seen here, and if that something is too big, it could easily, say, rip them to shreds. The woman could have killed the snake herself, no problem, but didn't want to. Evolutionarily, hyperaggressive constrictor snakes are a bad move. So I sort of wonder what happened to get this poor snake so angry.

Source: Fox 12 Oregon

London Smells
Apparently all of London smells like crap.

LONDON, England (CNN) -- A foul smell permeating London and parts of England over the past two days is due to farmers on the European continent spreading manure in their fields, forecasters and British farmers said Saturday.

The agricultural odor is inescapable in central London and smells vaguely of farmland or even garbage.

Forecasters said a stiff breeze from the east is carrying the smell across the North Sea from Belgium, the Netherlands and even Germany. They said the smell is likely to hang around through the weekend as the easterly wind continues.

"You can't say it's going to smell for two days, but the wind is coming in from the same direction," said Chris Almond, a forecaster with the Met Office, Britain's weather service.

"It's not really until Monday, Tuesday that we'll see a change in the wind direction, with a more marked improvement in air quality."

He said the smell had probably been stagnating in those countries for a few days, resulting in a more pungent aroma once the winds brought it to England.

There's even a monstrously boring political sideline to this story, but I can't bring myself to care, beyond the hilarity that an entire city reeks of cow crap.

Well, it's hilarious because I don't have to live there.

Source: CNN.com

Cold Storage
Another one of those stories about how people can survive long durations without oxygen if you get them really, really cold.

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- A gust of wind blew a 2-year-old in a stroller into Lake Michigan, where the boy remained submerged for at least 15 minutes before being pulled out unconscious but alive.

The child's grandfather, who had been pushing the stroller on the lakeside Friday afternoon, jumped into the harbor to try to save the boy, the Chicago Fire Department said.

...

The toddler was strapped in the three-wheeled jogging stroller about 10 feet below the surface of the 42-degree water before rescue divers pulled him out.

They should be thankful it was so cold. If the water had been warm and he'd been without O2 for that long he'd be a corpse.

But thanks to the miracles of hypothermia, his brain may well have survived, on ice so to speak, without the lack of oxygen killing all his neurons. That sort of thing happens with these exposure cases sometimes. Hopefully it will here too.

Man strollers are windy death traps though. Mythbusters had the same thing come up in a test of whether trains could blow/suck people on to the tracks. The stroller + dummy combo just went sailing down the rails after the train.

Source: CNN.com

Mainstream Media Megapost

2008-04-19T13:28:00.002-04:00

Heads in the Sand

How's that Surge Working Out?
The news media hates to cover the war they helped sell, but you'd think this sort of story would be significant.

BAGHDAD — A company of Iraqi soldiers abandoned their positions on Tuesday night in Sadr City, defying American soldiers who implored them to hold the line against Shiite militias.

The retreat left a crucial stretch of road on the front lines undefended for hours and led to a tense series of exchanges between American soldiers and about 50 Iraqi troops who were fleeing.

...

Tuesday’s desertions in Sadr City, although involving a particularly hesitant Iraqi unit, left many of the Americans soldiers wondering about the tenacity of their Iraqi allies.

“It bugs the hell out of me,” said Sgt. George Lewis, Captain Veath’s platoon sergeant in Company B, Third Platoon, First Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment. “We don’t see any progress being made at all. We hear these guys in firefights. We know if we are not up there helping these guys out we are making very little progress.”

Company B moved into Sadr City at the end of March as part of a broader effort to secure the southernmost portion of the densely populated Sadr City.

That area has been used by militias to fire 107-millimeter rockets toward the Green Zone. The Americans’ mission is to stop the rocket firings and help the Iraqi government establish a modicum of control.

Some Iraqi soldiers have fought hard. American soldiers have been regularly coaching them on how to protect their patrol bases, conserve ammunition and evacuate their wounded.

One big problem is that the Iraqi troops have responded to militia gunfire with such intense fusillades that the soldiers have endangered civilians, American soldiers and even their own forces. The barrage of Iraqi Army fire has become such a regular occurrence that some American soldiers are worried that militia fighters have tried to insert themselves between nearby Iraqi units to induce the Iraqi soldiers to fire on one another.

...

The Iraqi convoy drove off, and the Americans began to scramble to find a new Iraqi unit to plug the gap. Senior Iraqi commanders hurried to the scene and a special Iraqi reconnaissance unit was ordered to advance up the road. With the help of an American bomb-clearing unit, Stryker vehicles and attack helicopters, the Iraqis rumbled north, spraying rounds as they went. According to the last reports monitored by Company B, the Iraqis were stopped short by several roadside bombs, and planned to resume the push in daylight.

The furious Iraqi fire on their drive toward the abandoned base endangered the American soldiers who were bringing supplies to one of their platoons, and an American officer issued a plea over the tactical radio.

“They are lighting up everything,” he said. “Tell them to knock it off.”

So the 'elite' Iraqi unit that we had to scramble to find to plug the hole left by the deserters was also completely out of control.

This after mass defection and desertion during the Siege of Basra (which we lost, btw, not that the American media reports our military defeats).

Oh yeah, they're standing up so we can stand down, or whatever the new buzzphrase is.

Source: The New York Times

Bitter
The big fake 'bash the Democrat' story of the week this week is the intense, almost Talmudic parsing of the exact words Obama used to describe the frustration that working class people feel, and the ways in which conservative splinter factions divide and conquer the resulting electorate.

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama on Saturday defended labelling struggling working-class voters "bitter," insisting they have every reason to be frustrated.

"I said something that everybody knows is true, which is that there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana ... who are bitter," he said at a rally Saturday.

"They are angry. They feel like they've been left behind," he said of those hit by tough economic times. "That's a natural, natural response."

...

"So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations," Obama said, according to a transcript published by huffingtonpost.com.

Gee, you think?

You think that small town people with no hope and no future might be easy prey for opportunistic churches, lobby groups, what have you?

Nahh!

Senator Clinton, of course, always looking for a chance to kneecap Obama even if it puts McCain in the White House, jumped on this in the usual unseemly manner.

Clinton jumped on his statement as condescending.

"I was taken aback by the demeaning remarks Senator Obama made about people in small-town America," she said at a rally in Indiana Saturday.

"Senator Obama's remarks are elitist and are out of touch. They are not reflective of the values and beliefs of Americans. Certainly not the Americans that I know."

Speaking of McCain...

De facto Republican nominee John McCain's campaign also hit out at Obama's remarks.

"It shows an elitism and condescension toward hard-working Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking," McCain advisor Steve Schmidt told The New York Times.

"It is hard to imagine someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans."

Honestly, does she use the same speechwriters as McCain?

Obama, and this is to his credit, refused to retract the statement.

But Friday, Obama said he knew very well the struggles of middle-class voters.

"No, I'm in touch. I know exactly what's going on ... People are fed-up," he said.

"They're angry and they're frustrated and they're bitter. And they want to see a change in Washington and that's why I'm running for president of the United States of America."

So that's the state of that one. The polling after what the American press is 'cleverly' calling Bitter-Gate shows that Obama hasn't taken a hit for this at all. Perhaps because people realize that he's telling the truth. More likely because they're apathetic and divided to begin with.

Source: Raw Story

The Hits Keep On Coming
Of course, not content with the failure of their non-story to grow legs, the media kept finding new ways to flog it.

In his New York Times column today, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol claimed that Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) now-infamous “bitter” remarks sound like Karl Marx’s “famous statement about religion.” On the Brian and the Judge radio show today, Fox News’ senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano asked Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) if Obama is “a Marxist as Bill Kristol says might be the case?”

“I must say that’s a good question,” replied Lieberman, before stepping back to say that he would “hesitate to say he’s a Marxist”

Ahh, Short Bus Lieberman, the man who ran against a Democrat and lost in the primary, so he cheated his way through a general election (with 300k in bribes still unaccounted for), then extorted chairmanships of important committees to keep the Dems in the majority on paper in the Senate, then refused to do any actual work in this committees so that his buddies in the Bush administration could rest easy.

THAT Lieberman. I'd forgotten that asshole.

Then we have Karl Rove going on Fox to abuse the English language.

Yesterday, the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol claimed that Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) now-infamous “bitter” remarks were Marxist in nature. On Fox News’s Hannity And Colmes last night, former Bush adviser Karl Rove echoed Kristol’s over-the-top characterization, saying “it was almost Marxian“:

ROVE: I don’t find a lot of people in rural America, I certainly don’t find the dominant view to be — “I’m so bitter that I’m going to hold on to my gun or I’m gonna” — You know, it was almost Marxian in this they cling to their religion. I mean, you know, it’s sort of like it’s the opiate of the masses.

Hey, you braindead bucket of pus, it's 'Marxist'. 'Marxian' isn't a word, though it might be the title of a videogame from the 80s.

CNN Headline news continues of course to be a class act on the issue as well.

Even before Obama’s poorly worded comments last week, many on the right have been making a concerted effort to cast Obama as a socialist and a Marxist. For months now, right-wing talker Glenn Beck, who also hosts a show on CNN Headline News, has been referring to Obama as a “socialist“:

I hope it doesn’t matter to Barack. But he has heard the message of Jesus that shared prosperity is the thing to do. Hope, change, Marxism. This guy is a socialist and all you have to do is listen to his words.

So you see. Obama's a Marxist, for daring to note that people either a: want hope and change and are optimists or b: are frustrated and pessimistic.

What a dilemma, American press!

Sources: Think Progress (Marxist)
Think Progress (Marxian)

Math is Hard, Let's Vote McCain!
The press as a whole might as well wear his damn campaign buttons on air.

Summary: On MSNBC Live, Mika Brzezinski said that Sen. John McCain "wants to eliminate the federal gas tax -- that's about 20 percent of the cost." Later, Monica Novotny said McCain is "proposing suspending the federal gas tax for the summer, potentially cutting prices by nearly 20 percent." In fact, the federal gas tax -- 18.4 cents per gallon -- comprises only 5.4 percent of the current average cost of regular gasoline.

Yeah, I know when I gas up the car and pay 3.45 a gallon, it's not the first 3 dollars and twenty-seven cents that makes me cringe, it's that last 18. BECAUSE I AM A MORON, DUR

I honestly think part of the problem here is that these people are so out of touch they haven't had to gas up their own cars in a few years, and so can't honestly remember whether gas is 1 dollar a gallon or 3 half the time.

Source: Media Matters

Southern-Style Bigot
Hey I know, here's a story we can avoid: a Southern (ok, Kentuckian, but they want to be Southern) bigot called Senator Obama 'boy' at a fundraiser!

No reason to report on that! Everyone knows racism in America is dead.

Rep. Geoff Davis was speaking to about 400 donors at a fundraiser in Kentucky, when he said of Obama, "That boy's finger does not need to be on the button."

It gets better, because he was talking out of school about a classified exercise!

It also appears Davis may have released classified information in the exchange.
He said in his remarks at the GOP dinner that he also recently participated in a "highly classified, national security simulation" with Obama. "I'm going to tell you something: That boy's finger does not need to be on the button," Davis said. "He could not make a decision in that simulation that related to a nuclear threat to this country."

Now, I know Republicans tend to be retards, so I'll spell this out for him.

'Highly Classified' means SHUT YOUR GODDAMNED PIE-HOLE IN PUBLIC YOU IGNORANT SHEEP RAPING HICK! IF YOU CAN'T RESIST TALKING ABOUT IT, FIND A COCK TO SHOVE IN YOUR MOUTH!

You just have to know how to talk to these guys.

Source: Raw Story

Donuts
Amazingly, the same week that saw Obama called a Marxist, 'boy', and an elitist snob also saw him compared to Osama Bin Laden.

Again!

So much for the liberal media.

John McCain and Barack Obama both appeared before the nation's newspaper editors yesterday. The putative Republican presidential nominee was given a box of doughnuts and a standing ovation. The likely Democratic nominee was likened to a terrorist.

At a luncheon for the editors hosted by the Associated Press, AP Chairman Dean Singleton quizzed Obama about whether he would send more troops to Afghanistan, where "Obama bin Laden is still at large?"

"I think that was Osama bin Laden," the candidate answered.

"If I did that, I'm so sorry!" Singleton said.

"This," Obama told the editors, is "part of the exercise that I've been going through over the last 15 months."

Of course, Milbank then goes on to the BItter-Gate thing because he thinks it's clever. Still, at least he covered what should be, in an rational world, a scandal of epic proportions. So-called 'journalists' sucking up to a Presidential candidate in the most screaming fangirl way imaginable, short of actually asking him to sign their bodies with a marker.

McCain's moderators, the AP's Ron Fournier and Liz Sidoti, greeted McCain with a box of Dunkin' Donuts. "We spend quite a bit of time with you on the back of the Straight Talk Express asking you questions, and what we've decided to do today was invite everyone else along on the ride," Sidoti explained. "We even brought you your favorite treat."

McCain opened the offering. "Oh, yes, with sprinkles!" he said.

Sidoti passed him a cup. "A little coffee with a little cream and a little sugar," she said.

Hey, lady. You can stop trying so hard. We know McCain is an adulterer, he'll surely fuck you after the press event.

Jerks.

Source: The Washington Post

ORLY?
Of course this time around the press is being solidly lambasted for being so obviously in the tank for McCain, and they're getting sort of defensive about it. Note the tone here.

Both Democratic presidential candidates on Sunday night appeared at a CNN "Compassion Forum" at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania.

Messiah College describes itself as embracing an "evangelical spirit rooted in the Anabaptist, Pietist and Wesleyan traditions of the Christian Church."

As such, its "community covenant" states that members of the Messiah College community "avoid such sinful practices as drunkenness, stealing, dishonesty, profanity, occult practices, sexual intercourse outside of marriage, homosexual behavior, and sexually exploitative or abusive behavior."

In the past, Republican presidential candidates have been criticized for speaking at universities where certain religious beliefs are considered bigoted, most notoriously when then-Gov. George W. Bush in 2000 spoke at Bob Jones University, where anti-Catholic dogma was taught and inter-racial dating banned.

Messiah counsels its gay and lesbian students to seek the help of controversial organizations that use Scripture and behavioral exercises to coach them to stop acting on gay feelings and impulses.

It's not difficult to imagine a big outcry among liberal activists if, say, Republican presidential candidates attended such a forum hosted by, say, Fox News at such a university.

You're quite right, it's not hard to imagine. Unfortunately, when McCain goes to speak at one of these odious 'colleges' like Bob Jones, you people studiously refuse to cover it. When he courts the endorsement of Hagee, a whacko anti-Catholic bigot who wants to bring about the End Times by destroying Israel, you studiously ignore it.

You will, however, write a speculative piece on how liberals must be hypocrites, then bookened it with an anonymous letter from a reader taring into the liberals for not being upset.

Anonymous smears? Faux outrage? Defensive, passive-aggressive reporting?

Yes, it is indeed the Mainstream Media.

Source: 'Political Punch' at ABC News

Punchy
Of course, Jake Tapper has more fake scandals to peddle.

In an interview with the Charlotte Observer, Johnson says that former vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro was right.

If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," she said, just before the resulting firestorm forced her to step down as an adviser to Obama rival Hillary Clinton.

"What I believe Geraldine Ferraro meant (is) if you take a freshman senator from Illinois called 'Jerry Smith' and he says I'm going to run for president, would he start off with 90 percent of the black vote? And the answer is, probably not. Would he also start out with the excitement of starting out as something completely different? Probably not. He would just be a freshmen senator ...

But of course, that's not the whole story on Ferraro, who has a history of bashing black candidates, and said Obama was 'lucky' to be black, which is a whole different story.

Tapper undoubtedly knows this and doesn't correct it. I'm not sure why, but doing his job is probably too much to ask at any rate.

Source: 'Political Punch' again

Hunger for the Trivial
If you ever have any doubt that our press hungers, thirsts, lives and dies for the trivial and the stupid, steadfastly refusing to inform people or do any real work, then this should put that doubt to bed forever.

Last August, I ran into Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, outside the Senate chamber in the Capitol.

This was before the Obama surge, before he had omnipresent Secret Service agents, back when you might see him strolling solo.

We chatted for a second, mainly about the Pakistan speech he'd recently given and about how the media had covered it. He was in good spirits.

As any close friend or family member can attest, I have an unusually keen sense of smell and immediately I smelled cigarette smoke on Obama. Frankly, he reeked of cigarettes.

Yes, that's right, Jake Tapper, bloodhound-human hybrid, is on the case!

Obama ran off before I could ask him if he'd just snuck a smoke, so I called his campaign.

They denied it. He'd quit months before, in February, they insisted. He chewed nicorette.

But I knew what I'd smelled and I asked his campaign to double-check and to ask him if he'd had a cigarette.

They reported back that he had told them he hadn't had a cigarette since he quit.

And maybe that was true. Maybe I imagined the cigarette smoke. My olfactory nerve somehow misfired.

Except….last night on MSNBC's Hardball, Obama admitted that his attempt to wean himself from the vile tobacco weed had not been entirely successful.

“I fell off the wagon a couple times during the course of it, and then was able to get back on," he said. "But it is a struggle like everything else.”

Now I wonder about last August.

Oh yes, this is a conspiracy right up there with Iran-Contra, Watergate, the Gulf of Tonkin and the right-wing coup against FDR. Please, Tapper, continue!

It's not a big deal in the scheme of things -- the war on Iraq, a major economic crisis -- indeed, it's miniscule. Hardly worth mentioning.

Except that I don't like feeling that I wasn't being dealt with honestly. And as much as citizens who are suspect of the media might scoff at such a notion, many of us consider ourselves to be your representatives to help make sure our leaders are telling us the truth, and leading the country down a path we as a nation are confident is the right one. (Corny, I know.)

Not corny so much as self-serving, egotistical, arrogant and wrongheaded. But thank goodness we have you to make sure the path our politicans lead us on is the 'right one'.

IT IS ENTIRELY UP TO YOU, JAKE TAPPER, TO SAVE US FROM OUR CHAIN SMOKING SELVES

Source: Same as above. Home of the Idiot.

NYT
Not that ABC is alone in refusing to cover important stories in favor of trivial nonsense, of course.

Even the New York Times gets in on that sweet ignoring history action.

Meanwhile, Fair reports on the NYT's excuse for failing to cover the hearings.
New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt has offered a response to media activists who wrote to the paper about its non-coverage of last month's Winter Soldier hearings. Hoyt's explanation is that reporters at the Times had "not been aware of the group or its meeting," but likely wouldn't have covered it if they had been aware of the event.

The idea that the Times was unaware of Winter Soldier is remarkable; the paper's D.C. reporters were repeatedly sent press releases about the events, the same ones that other media outlets received that did manage to cover the event, ranging from Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now! to the New York Times' corporate sibling the Boston Globe.

Yes, who needs to cover a major meeting of Iraq war vets discussing at length the atrocities they and others committed in the name of our country's imperial ambition?

Atrocities like these:

Soldiers and vets told how superior officers instructed them on the official ways to torment and beat detainees. Andrew Duffy, a medic who served on the trauma team at the Abu Ghraib military prison, put it this way, "You can't spell abuse without 'Abu.'" They were told to use the term "detainee" because, unlike "prisoner of war," there are no laws protecting detainees. While he rocked back and forth in his seat nervously, Mathew Childess, a Marine infantryman who served two tours in Iraq, referred to beating detainees and "breaking fingers." When a particular detainee begged for food and water, he took the man's hat, wiped himself with it, and stuffed it into the man's mouth.

Breaking fingers? Denying food and water?

Nah! Total non-story! Quick, did Obama say anything we can label elitist today?

Source: The Impolitic

Eye in the Sky
Speaking of stories that the press would never even consider covering in depth, El Presidente is prepping a new spy satellite network solely dedicated to watching what American citizens do on American soil.

The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation's most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon, rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea's legal authority.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his department will activate his department's new domestic satellite surveillance office in stages, starting as soon as possible with traditional scientific and homeland security activities -- such as tracking hurricane damage, monitoring climate change and creating terrain maps.

...

But Congress delayed launch of the new office last October. Critics cited its potential to expand the role of military assets in domestic law enforcement, to turn new or as-yet-undeveloped technologies against Americans without adequate public debate, and to divert the existing civilian and scientific focus of some satellite work to security uses.

Democrats say Chertoff has not spelled out what federal laws govern the NAO, whose funding and size are classified. Congress barred Homeland Security from funding the office until its investigators could review the office's operating procedures and safeguards. The department submitted answers on Thursday, but some lawmakers promptly said the response was inadequate.

"I have had a firsthand experience with the trust-me theory of law from this administration," said Harman, citing the 2005 disclosure of the National Security Agency's domestic spying program, which included warrantless eavesdropping on calls and e-mails between people in the United States and overseas. "I won't make the same mistake. . . . I want to see the legal underpinnings for the whole program."

Pfft, Harman, calm down. It's not like the Bush administration would ever LIE to us or violate our rights in secret!

Source: The Washington Post

Debatey
It wouldn't be a post on the near-total wasteland that is the American press if it didn't mention the 'Democratic' debate from Wednesday. A debate that focused, not on issues like the economy, the housing collapse, the failing infrastructure or the war in Iraq, but rather on whether Obama was patriotic enough, whether his pastor (a former Marine) was patriotic enough, and whether, gasp, someone might raise the capital gains tax back up to approximately the level that actual working people pay on THEIR taxes.

A shocking concept.

Basically, the debate went 56 long minutes before a single policy question, and then only asked one more over the rest of the two hours of time suck. They found time for every petty, pointless issue, every campaign 'gaffe', to grill Obama over what, exactly, 'bitter' means, and the like. But no time for the housing fiasco, no time for Afghanistan, no time for our bridges that are literally falling down or our planes that are being grounded en masse for safety violations. Nothing. We got one question on Iraq and one question on.....gas prices. Which really are one issue. There was saber rattling on Iran, but no serious discussion of how, say, we've screwed up that country, and any action we take toward them now will only be seen as aggression by the world community, or how they're a complete non-threat, and the like.

Yeesh. What a mess. By the end the audience was booing the moderators, and with good reason.

Source: The Philadelphia Daily News (Attytood blog)

Plutocrats
Charlie Gibson was particularly upset about the capital gains tax during the debate, and it's easy to see why; he's rich, and must not like paying taxes so that the rabble can have their social programs, education, and so forth.

What's even more interesting is that he labors under the misapprehension that ordinary Americans are rich as well. From back in January:

Summary: During the ABC News-Facebook debate, moderator Charlie Gibson suggested that the Democratic presidential candidates' proposals to roll back or let some of President Bush's tax cuts expire would affect middle-class families, adding, "If you take a family of two professors here at St. Anselm, they're going to be in the $200,000 category that you're talking about lifting the taxes on." According to the U.S. Census, however, the median income for a U.S. household is $48,451, and the mean household income is $65,527; and only 3.4 percent of U.S. households have an income of $200,000 or more.

The man is completely out of touch. It's similar to how nobody on tv seemed to know how much a gallon of gas cost these days; they also have no idea what the 'little people' make in a year.

Which might go a long way to explaining how wrong-headed they are on every meaningful economic policy.

Meanwhile, Ezra Klein provides a helpful graph showing just how, in fact, completely out of touch Charlie is with his hypothetical 'middle class' family scenario.

These people are shockingly ignorant.

Sources: Media Matters
Ezra Klein

The Media's Greatest Hit(Job)s
Just in case anyone was wondering if Republicans and Democrats face differing standards in the American media, I thought a couple of examples of great distortions from our recent past by the corporate press would prove illuminating.

First, a small taste of the sort of press abuse that helped turn Hillary Clinton into what she is today: a hyperaggressive, defensive and self-destructive Presidential candidate.

The gist of this is the following: in the 90s, when Hillary was considering a move to New York, she was labeled a phony for declaring herself a Yankees fan. The press hopped all over her, and repeated accusations that she was lying, without proof, ad nauseam.

In June 1999, the New York Yankees were coming to the White House to be feted for the previous year’s World Series win. On the Today show, Hillary Clinton told Katie Couric that she had been a fan of the Yankees along with the Cubs when she grew up in Chicago.

To this day, there is no reason to doubt this statement. In 1993 and 1994, in fact, the Washington Post had published two separate profiles which alluded to Clinton’s youthful love for the Yankees. “I needed an American League team,” Clinton told Couric. “Because when you're from Chicago, you cannot root for both the Cubs and the Sox.” None of this was ever worth talking about. But the pre-existing evidence plainly suggests that what Clinton said was accurate.

None of this was worth talking about—except within the “press corps.”

You see, in June 1999, the press corps was busy reinventing Al Gore as the world’s biggest liar. They hated Hillary Clinton’s husband—he had gotten ten blow jobs; they hadn’t—and they were now directing their fury at everyone found in his court. Two Post profiles plainly suggested that Clinton had been a Yankees fan. But the insider press corps was up for some fun. It started in the new York Times, with this report by Katherine “Kit” Seelye:

SEELYE (6/11/99): “The fact is, I've always been a Yankees fan,” the First Lady, who was born and bred in Chicago, asserted this morning to Katie Couric on NBC's "Today Show" in anticipation of the championship team's visit to the White House this evening. When the puzzled Ms. Couric said she thought Mrs. Clinton was a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan, the First Lady, in a classic Clintonian gesture, quickly claimed loyalty to the Cubs, too.

It goes on and on and on from there. They spilled gallon upon gallon of ink coming up with new 'creative' ways to label her a liar, when the evidence suggests that she, in fact, always was a Yankees fan.

By now, it was a Clintonian lie. “Talk about building a mountain out of a molehill, Sam Donaldson said, interrupting Will—though he himself plainly implied that what Clinton had said was a stretcher. Moments later, Roberts put her cosmic inanity on full display. She explained who it was she most pitied:

ROBERTS: I must say the part that made me sad was Joe Torre standing there [at the White House]. I'm a great admirer of Joe Torre and for him to be used in this way, it was a little—

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, I think you'll see her sitting at court side between Spike Lee and Matt Dillon in the Knicks playoffs coming up. But her much bigger problem is the news in the, the New York Times, this morning, whether or not Ken Starr is going to be issuing some sort of a scathing report. I think—

WILL: I'm sorry, that's part of the same thing. This is not a mountain out of a molehill. They can't tell the truth!

“They can’t tell the truth,” Will said—as his panel kept failing to tell the truth. (This is a very familiar pattern from this lunatic era.) But you know what this was really about. At the end, a tut-tutting Cokie was required by law to go there:

ROBERTS: Yes, you should stick with your team. It's one of those loyalty issues.

WILL: And your state.

ROBERTS: Well, and then there's husbands. Well, Sam and I will be back in a moment.

Hiss! Hiss-spit! Hiss-spit! Mee-ow!! And don’t worry—the gasbag gang was just getting started.

Ha! See, you can't trust Hillary, because she exercised different judgment than Cokie Roberts would have in her own marriage.

And everyone knows, Cokie is God.

Unfortunately for America, the press had bigger fish to fry, and moved on from calling Clinton a liar to calling Al Gore one, in order to sink his Presidential ambitions.

Their all-time greatest example of his 'lies'?

That he said he 'invented the internet'.

Internet of Lies

Claim: Vice-President Al Gore claimed that he "invented" the Internet.

Status: False.

Origins: Despite the derisive references that continue even today, Al Gore did not claim he "invented" the Internet, nor did he say anything that could reasonably be interpreted that way. The "Al Gore said he 'invented' the Internet" put-downs were misleading, out-of-context distortions of something he said during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN's "Late Edition" program on 9 March 1999. When asked to describe what distinguished him from his challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gore replied (in part):
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
Clearly, although Gore's phrasing might have been a bit clumsy (and perhaps self-serving), he was not claiming that he "invented" the Internet (in the sense of having designed or implemented it), but that he was responsible, in an economic and legislative sense, for fostering the development the technology that we now know as the Internet.

Ah, but was he in fact responsible for doing so?

Sadly, Yes!

It is true, though, that Gore was popularizing the term "information superhighway" in the early 1990s (although he did not, as is often claimed by others, coin the phrase himself) when few people outside academia or the computer/defense industries had heard of the Internet, and he sponsored the 1988 National High-Performance Computer Act (which established a national computing plan and helped link universities and libraries via a shared network) and cosponsored the Information Infrastructure and Technology Act of 1992 (which opened the Internet to commercial traffic).

So Al Gore sponsored the bill that linked universities and libraries to the proto-Net, and cosponsored the bill that opened the Net to commercial traffic.

But he had nothing to do with it and is a big fat liar, of course.

This sort of thing will always happen to Democratic candidates for President. Our press is made up of a bunch of self-entitled elitists who resent, to the point of pathological loathing, someone from their class who votes against their interests. Witness the disgusting spectacle Wednesday night where the CAPITAL GAINS TAX got time in the Democratic debate but not the mortgage crisis, the environment, or healthcare.

Because the moderators are themselves very, very wealthy, and as very wealthy people, the capital gains tax is important to them. And important to keep low.

Repugnant fools.

Sources: The Daily Howler
Snopes

Orchestra of Bloggeral Madness

2008-04-17T11:51:00.003-04:00

Litany of Sorrows

New Anime
So it wouldn't be fair to use the Hyper-Dramatic Anime/Videogame title scheme and have nothing about anime or videogames in this post, would it?

Hence I'll note, for my own uses, some of the spring anime premieres that Anime News Network is covering and which sound interesting.

First up is Soul Eater, the new project from Studio Bones, who did the fantastic Full Metal Alchemist and the dizzily beautiful Eureka 7. It's a dark comedic work that sounds like a cross between an action show and I Luv Halloween.

Then there's Kurenai, a low key drama with noir elements about a mysterious enforcer given the task of caring for, hiding, and ultimately protecting a privileged little girl from her powerful family.

Another one I want to see more of is Zettai Karen Children, which is apparently a Powerpuff Girls parody, intentionally or otherwise. It sounds delightfully deranged.

Also this year sees another Macross series, Macross Frontier, done by Satelite, who made the quite respectable Noein that I finished watching a couple weeks ago. They can certainly do action-drama, so I hold out hope that this won't suck.

I'm also interested in Code Geass, which is hitting its second season in Japan and I think comes out in the US soon. Apparently it's a hilarious combination of series drama, giant robots and hysterically over the top melodrama.

Finally there's Wagaya no Oinari-sama, a supernatural horror kind of show about a medieval Japanese fox deity who becomes the guardian of a dying shrine in the modern era. That definitely sounds like it has promise.

A couple of these shows, Zettai Karen Children and Kurenai, have gotten very good reviews on ANN, except for one out of the four reviewers, by the name of Casey Brienza. Quite frankly half the reason I want to watch ZKC is because this one person found it so offensive.

This Muscle Okama is presented as a gay man. He swishes, he talks in feminine language, he hits on Kouichi, he humps nude male statues. He also shoots bizarre psychic beams from his groin. At first I was amused by the ridiculousness, but it wore off quickly, and I can't remember the last time I've seen an anime series portray a minority group so offensively. No anime these days would represent even black people in so blatantly stereotypical a fashion.

Arguably worse, however, is Kaoru's apparent lesbianism and her characterization as a perverted old man. You know, I get that oogling boobs and butts can be an important part of the pleasure of these sorts of things. But showing a little girl doing it—as if that makes objectifying behavior somehow morally excusable? That's inexcusable in a way that no amount of cheerfully bobbing breasts alone will ever be.

Objectifying behavior? It's an ANIME CHARACTER. Not to mention a satirical one. How can you objectify AN OBJECT?

THe mind boggles. The Muscle Okama thing is harder to dismiss out of hand, but from the sound of it he might be a joke about bodybuilders and all the repressed homoeroticism in their industry rather than gay people in general. Talk to an actual bodybuilder about the subject sometime, it can be quite entertaining.

They also seem to be alone in disliking Kurenai. I'm beginning to wonder if they're my anti-reviewer of choice, that what they love is what I hate and vice versa.

Unfortunately, they like Macross Frontier a lot. That bodes ill for either my theory or the show.

Update: In a new addition to their review page they bash Saiyuki, a very meandering but still hilarious show.

It's official: they are the anti-me.

Source: Anime News Network (spring anime guide)

Tracking
Here's an ominous anime development for you. A tracking system for conventions was deployed to data-mine the attendees.

Anime Punch, which ran in Columbus, Ohio this past weekend, has become the first anime convention in North America to use radio-frequency identification (RFID) to capture data about attendance at events held throughout its three days. An index card with an RFID transponder was attached to the backs of badges for each of the convention's 1,337 paying attendees, as well as staffers and guests. Information about the location of each transponder, as well as the total number of transponders in certain rooms at any given time, was captured and stored on a central server. Attendees entering the convention's dealers' room had their badges scanned with a reader each time they walked into the room.

Apparently this has been done before at medical conferences and so forth.

In all seriousness it's really not ominous, but it is a bit annoying to be tracked wherever you go. Especially since it's mandatory. If I was going to a convention I knew would be doing this, I'd bring tinfoil to wrap around my card when I didn't need it. Thus I'd be 'off the grid' and all super-spooky.

Or something. I like screwing with data collection, what can I say. I filled out those 'what drugs do you take' surveys in high school with absurdly high and random amounts of drugs, at least the last one. I think I said I took a bunch of stimulants I'd never heard of 20-30 times a month.

I'm fairly sure you'd die if you did half the drugs I claimed to do.

Source: Anime News Network

Older Anime
Some older series I'm interested in to go with the new ones.

First, D.Gray Man, which is apparently about a guy with a cursed left eye that can fight demons and so forth. It's also a historical fantasy series.

I could use a dark historical fantasy series, but I'm interested in this as much for it being yet another show with a character whose left eye is cursed/magical/magically cursed/missing. I wonder if Japan has a thing, some cultural mythos, about left eyes.

*shrug*

Then there's Innocent Venus, a short series about life after the Apocalypse, with a mysterious conspiracy, blah blah. It could be fun.

Finally there's Kyo kara Maoh!, a show which has been compared to Saiyuki in that it has Shoujo art and Shonen sensibilities.

I liked that with Saiyuki, so I'm willing to give it another chance. Plus there are definitely points for a series whose gateway to another world is via the toilet. At least, the first time. (It seems that they use bodies of standing water or something to travel, which is both more classically mystical and boring).

Sources: Anime News Network
D.Gray Man
Innocent Venus
Kyo kara Maoh!

Spielbergian
So Spielberg's company Dreamworks is going to make a live action version of Ghost in the Shell, the classic anime cyber-surrealist-noir movie.

Variety reports that Universal and Sony also negotiated for the rights, which the Production I.G anime studio was pitching for the manga's original publisher Kodansha. What turned the dealmaking in DreamWorks' favor was co-founder Steven Spielberg's enthusiasm for the project. The entertainment trade newspaper quotes the acclaimed director and producer: "Ghost in the Shell is one of my favorite stories. It's a genre that has arrived, and we enthusiastically welcome it to DreamWorks."

It doesn't say whether he will be involved, though Avi Arad who used to work with Marvel and did work on both the great Spiderman and execrable X-Men movie franchises will produce.

This could go... oh face it, it's probably going to suck ass.

Source: Anime News Network

Onion Tastic
A couple of those great Onion graphics that all right-thinking people love.

First a comic on the Elliot Spitzer scandal and the 'Real Disgrace' involved.

Then a short but pity summary of the death of Charlton Heston.

Very Odd
Some brief odd news items from around the world.

First, in Russia they're cracking down on Madam Cleo types.

Russian deputies are to consider a law that would turn up the heat on advertising by witches and healers enjoying a meteoric growth in demand, the Gazeta daily reported on Friday.

The law, which is to have its first reading in parliament's lower chamber shortly, would allow only officially registered healers to advertise in newspapers, Gazeta reported.

The paper quoted one of the bill's authors, parliamentarian Vladimir Medinsky, as casting scorn on the colourful small advertisements that brim from the pages of Russia's popular press.

The bill's introduction argues that "citizens who believe in the adverts of magicians and witches often become the victims of commonplace fraud," the paper said.

So they'll only allow officially registered frauds to trick people into thinking magic crystals and curses work?

That's an improvement? I guess it might bring in tax revenue.

Source: Raw Story

Next up is some jerk who apparently likes to kill squirrels.

An animal protection group is investigating claims made by British band The Falls Mark E. Smith that he killed two endangered red squirrels and condones the deliberate running over of seagulls, it said Thursday.

The revered but unpredictable frontman of Manchester band The Fall said that he would not hesitate setting about a squirrel with a pair of hedge-clippers.

"Squirrels mean nothing to me. I killed a couple last weekend actually. They were eating my garden fence," Smith told Uncut magazine, although it was unclear whether he had confused the animal with their more prevalent American grey cousins.

The singer, whose group has gone through 50 different members and produced 27 albums in their career, also said he "wouldn't have a problem" with people purposefully driving over seagulls in their cars

He may have just killed American grey squirrels, which are something of a pest in the UK, but still not deserving of hedge clipper death.

The worst part for me is that this idiot, if he's telling the truth, killed squrrels for nothing. They don't eat 'fences', whether he means gnawing on wood or eating a hedge. I've never seen a squirrel eat anything but seeds and such. They're hardly a big nuisance.

Also, how would he catch one to kill it? They're wily.

Source: Raw Story

Hobbit
Finally, someone thought up the perfect descriptive term for Joe Lieberman.

Joe Lieberman, whom Chris Durang once called a "sanctimonious Hobbitt," had his ass kicked out of the Democratic party. He's a petty, bitter, nasty little man and he's backing John McCain because that represents his own personal political upside.

How apt! How true!

Thank you, Chris Durang. I shall use your epithet with gusto.

Source: Firedoglake

Ha-HAH
This is so great.

At 39 months in the doghouse, George W. Bush has surpassed Harry Truman's record as the postwar president to linger longest without majority public approval.

Bush hasn't received majority approval for his work in office in ABC News/Washington Post polls since Jan. 16, 2005 three years and three months ago. The previous record was Truman's during his last 38 months in office.

Most disliked president since they started keeping polls.

There's your legacy, W. Suck on it.

Source: Firedoglake

So Funny Can't Breathe
Alberto 'Fredo' Gonzales can't find work after his disastrous and hilarious tenure as Attorney General.

Man, it's sweet to see a jerk fall so far, so fast, so HARD.

WASHINGTON — Alberto R. Gonzales, like many others recently unemployed, has discovered how difficult it can be to find a new job. Mr. Gonzales, the former attorney general, who was forced to resign last year, has been unable to interest law firms in adding his name to their roster, Washington lawyers and his associates said in recent interviews.

...

The greatest impediment to Mr. Gonzales’s being offered the kind of high-salary job being snagged these days by lesser Justice Department officials, many lawyers agree, is his performance during his last few months in office. In that period, he was openly criticized by lawmakers for being untruthful in his sworn testimony. His conduct is being investigated by the Office of the Inspector General of the Justice Department, which could recommend actions from exonerating him to recommending criminal charges. Friends set up a fund to help pay his legal bills.

Shocking. Law firms don't want to hire a man facing serious criminal investigation, who also possesses a terrible track record at work.

Hahahahahhaha.....

Source: The New York Times

Nude
So a photographer auctioned off a nude portrait he did of France's first lady back when she was a fashion model for charity. The shot was originally done for Italian Vogue and thus Carla Bruni was hardly unaware that it might be used for commercial purposes one day.

Still, the charity in Cambodia turned down the large sum of cash on 'moral' grounds.

Beat Richner, a Swiss paediatrician who runs a children's medical care group, said he had turned down an offer of $91,000 (£46,000) - the sum paid in a Christie's auction last week for the 1993 picture of the Italian ex-model, now married to the French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

"My decision was taken out of respect for our patients and their mothers", he told Le Matin Dimanche. "Accepting money obtained from exploitation of the female body would be perceived as an insult".

In Cambodia "use of nudity is not understood in the way it is in the West", he added.

He would not allow the Kantha Bopha Children's Hospital Association "to be involved in the media exploitation of Madame Bruni".

"The idea behind this gift was to get publicity for the auction and the photographer", Mr Richner was also quoted as saying. "It was a way of using us".

Michel Comte, the Swiss photographer who took picture of the then Miss Bruniposing naked with her crossed hands acting as a fig leaf, was quoted in the Swiss press last month as saying he had thousands more images of her, some more risqué - taken over a ten-year period.

Of course he was doing it for publicity. That's often the case with charity work.

The fact of the matter us, this guy still turned down a ton of money for poor kids because he didn't like a nude photo.

I sincerely doubt the Cambodians closely follow French fashion, so the line about THE LOCALS is a bit much.

Once again, conservatism does not pay. But don't worry, the children will!

Source: The Telegraph

Tax Day Sale
Comedy Central is having a sale on Colbert and Daily Show merch. Considering that their clothing is normally obscenely pricey, this only brings it down to Sanity range, but still.

Source: Comedy Central

Bush Lawyers

2008-04-13T14:26:00.001-04:00

For When Newspeak and Doublethink Don't Go Far Enough

John Yoo, Tenured Loser
Apparently John Yoo gets to return to his job teaching at Berkeley law school, despite being the author of the infamous torture memoranda that gave Bush the greenlight for Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the CIA 'black sites' around the world, etc.

The dean of Berkeley's law school says he is "substantively" troubled by former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo's legal memos, which critics say authorize torture, but he does not believe Yoo's conduct while working for the Bush administration justifies his dismissal from the law school where he has taught for a decade.

...

Assuming one believes as I do that Professor Yoo offered bad ideas and even worse advice during his government service, that judgment alone would not warrant dismissal or even a potentially chilling inquiry. As a legal matter, the test here is the relevant excerpt from the "General University Policy Regarding Academic Appointees," adopted for the 10-campus University of California by both the system-wide Academic Senate and the Board of Regents:

Types of unacceptable conduct: … Commission of a criminal act which has led to conviction in a court of law and which clearly demonstrates unfitness to continue as a member of the faculty. [Academic Personnel Manual sec. 015]

This very restrictive standard is binding on me as dean, but I will put aside that shield and state my independent and personal view of the matter. I believe the crucial questions in view of our university mission are these: Was there clear professional misconduct—that is, some breach of the professional ethics applicable to a government attorney—material to Professor Yoo’s academic position? Did the writing of the memoranda, and his related conduct, violate a criminal or comparable statute?

I guess advocating torture and murder in an official government capacity is legal for an American.

In World War II, we put people like Yoo on trial at Nuremberg, but times have changed.

Source: Raw Story

Just So You Know Who You're Dealing With
Here's an excerpt of Yoo's sterling legal thinking, from a 2006 debate with an actual human being.

This came out in response to a question in a December 1st debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel.

What is particularly chilling and revealing about this is that John Yoo was a key architect post-9/11 Bush Administration legal policy. As a deputy assistant to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, John Yoo authored a number of legal memos arguing for unlimited presidential powers to order torture of captive suspects, and to declare war anytime, any where, and on anyone the President deemed a threat.

It has now come out Yoo also had a hand in providing legal reasoning for the President to conduct unauthorized wiretaps of U.S. citizens. Georgetown Law Professor David Cole wrote, "Few lawyers have had more influence on President Bush’s legal policies in the 'war on terror’ than John Yoo."

This part of the exchange during the debate with Doug Cassel, reveals the logic of Yoo’s theories, adopted by the Administration as bedrock principles, in the real world.

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

Yes, Yoo thinks that there is no treaty or law that Congress can pass or approve that would ban the President of the United States from ordering the torture and mutilation of children.

It all depends on WHY he wants to crush a child's testicles with a hammer, you see.

Source: Information Clearinghouse

Eighth Amendment? What's That?
John Yoo is also the man who argued that torture doesn't violate the 8th Amendment because, even though a person has been declared an enemy combatant and is being held against their will, they're not being CONVICTED of anything, so it's ok to beat them and strap electrodes on and so forth.

A second constitutional provision which might be thought relevant to interrogations is the Eighth Amendment. The Eighth Amendment, however, applies solely to those persons upon whom criminal sanctions have been imposed.
--snip--
The Eighth Amendment thus has no application to those individuals who have not been punished as part of a criminal proceeding, irrespective of the fact that they have been detained by the government.
--snip--
The detention of enemy combatants can in no sense be deemed "punishment" for the purposes of the Eighth Amendment. Unlike imprisonment pursuant to criminal sanction, the detention of enemy combatants involves no sentence judicially imposed or legislatively required and those detained will be released at the end of the conflict.

See? It's ok to torture people as long as they have not been convicted of anything!

His reasoning, ironically enough, means that the only people safe from torture are convicts.

Justice Scalia shares this Alice in Wonderland approach to punishment of course.

Scalia said that it was "extraordinary" to assume that the U.S. Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" also applied to "so-called" torture.

"To begin with the Constitution ... is referring to punishment for crime. And, for example, incarcerating someone indefinitely would certainly be cruel and unusual punishment for a crime," he said in an interview with the Law in Action program on BBC Radio 4.

Scalia said stronger measures could be taken when a witness refused to answer questions.

"I suppose it's the same thing about so-called torture. Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the Constitution?" he asked.

"It would be absurd to say you couldn't do that. And once you acknowledge that, we're into a different game" Scalia said. "How close does the threat have to be? And how severe can the infliction of pain be?"

See? Torture is ok, if people are not yet convicted of a crime!

You can only punish the legally innocent!

What incentive is there for anyone to ever be tried at all? Just round up all your enemies, shove them in holes, and every couple of days haul them out for a rousing waterboard session. Don't bother thinking up charges; YOU WON'T NEED THEM.

Source: Firedoglake

Yoo Memo
And here of course is the famous Yoo Memo from last week, where he argues that, amongst other things, the military can MAIM YOU in the course of an interrogation, and that's ok.

Seriously. He does.

He also argues that the Fifth Amendment doesn't apply to torture, so long as it's done outside the United States, or to people who aren't US citizens.

And that the 8th amendment, again, has no place in torture.

From just a skim of this trash, which I intend to digest later when my blood pressure goes back down, it appears that Yoo likes to dance on the edge of any number of knives; what the President does to prisoners is ok, because we're at war, and you can do what you like during a war to people on the other side, according to the Constitution and Federal Law. Of course, if we WERE at war, the Geneva Conventions would apply, so we're not, because that would be wrong. But if we're not at war, then the Fifth Amendment would apply, at least on US soil (which Guantanamo is, for example, by treaty)... so we're not.

We're in a Quantum War state, both in, and not in, war at the same time. Our prisoners are both POWs, and not POWs. Our prisons are both US facilities, and foreign ones, as we see fit.

And on, and on, and on, down and down we go into the very pits of hell.

Source: Chicago Tribune

Finally, From the Bill of Rights

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

Amendment VIII

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

It almost seems like the Fourth Amendment guarantees your right to being safe in your own body, doesn't it?

And the Fifth, to being held against your will without due process, except perhaps during a war, which we never declared.

Or the Sixth, guaranteeing that you can't be held forever without a trial.

Or the Eighth, that doesn't seem to deal strictly with stuff that happens after a trial, as Scalia says, does it? I mean, you don't have bail AFTER a conviction. It's almost like they're NEVER supposed to beat you with metal rods.

And the Ninth would seem to say that, just because the Constitution never spells out 'We cannot torture people, cut off their fingers, torture their kids and rape their wives', that doesn't mean that the Government can, in fact, cut off your fingers, torture your kids or rape your wife.

Funny. I must be wrong, because a Berkeley law professor says it just isn't so.

Source: Cornell Law

Pre-Dinner Science

2008-04-09T19:15:00.002-04:00

Soon I Shall Explore the Science of Tacos

Emo Tree
What terrible force can lead a tree to such depths of depression?

We may never know.

Source: The Daily Telepgraph

Similar Features
Not an Etheridge song, but a solar system very similar to our own, if a bit small.

Astronomers have discovered a planetary system orbiting a distant star which looks much like our own.

They found two planets that were close matches for Jupiter and Saturn orbiting a star about half the size of our Sun.

...

"It's a kind of scaled-down version of our Solar System. The star the planets are orbiting is half as massive as the Sun and they orbit half as distant to their host star as Jupiter and Saturn orbit around the Sun," said Dr Dominik.

Pint-sized.

The researchers hope to find Earth-like worlds soon using these techniques, which would be great. The more stuff like this we find, the further the religious fundies have to bury their heads to ignore it, and eventually they'll just wander off into their own little dreamworlds. I hope.

Source: BBC News

Creepy
A NASA office building apparently may have an astonishing rate of cancer.

CLEVELAND -- There are 40 cases of cancer among people who work in the same building at NASA Glenn Research Center.

Dozens of the employees fear that their cancer was triggered by years of working in the developmental engineering building, NewsChannel5 reported.

The union that represents hundreds of scientists and other workers said nearly half of the 100 employees on the third floor of the building have been diagnosed with various forms of cancer in the past three to four years.

"What we've seen in the way of cancer here has just been astronomical on this third floor alone and we're just a little scared," said Dennis Pehotsky, of the Lewis Engineers and Scientists Association.

In a written statement, the head of safety at NASA Glenn said an employee survey shows cancer rates among workers are within the normal range, saying "Glenn management has no evidence of the number of cases that the union is reporting."

Union officials said they believe many employees feared reprisal for answering the survey honestly.

Wow. If this is right, there has to be something off about that building. I wonder what could have changed recently to make it so toxic. A chemical spill? Exposed insulation?

Source: WEWS Cleveland News

Stem Cells Again
Yet another possible cure for a heinous disease derived from stem cells or their artificial equivalents.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Skin cells re-programmed to act like embryonic stem cells eased symptoms of Parkinson's disease in rats, researchers reported on Monday in a first step toward tailored treatments for people that bypass concerns about using human embryos.

The experiment suggests it may be possible to take a small sample of skin and turn it into a transplant perfectly matched to patients with Parkinson's and other diseases, the researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It also supports the usefulness of newly created cells that resemble powerful embryonic stem cells. The stem cell experts used so-called induced pluripotent stem cells, which are skin cells reprogrammed to act like embryonic stem cells.

...

Stem cells taken from very early embryos appear to be the most malleable and the most powerful. But many people object to their use because the embryo usually must be destroyed to extract them.

Several teams have reported a way to re-program ordinary skin cells to act like embryonic stem cells by adding several genes. Jaenisch's team tested some of these cells in rats and mice. They first got such cells to take up residence in the brains of unborn mice.

...

Then they damaged the brains of rats to resemble Parkinson's, which is caused by the destruction of certain brain cells that produce a message-carrying chemical called dopamine. Patients lose abilities associated with movement, and progress from a type of shakiness to paralysis and death.

There is no cure. Transplants of cells from fetuses have offered some relief from symptoms in a few people.

In the rats, the cell transplants improved symptoms markedly, the researchers said.

...

Viruses are used to carry the new genes into the skin cells and transform them, an approach that could cause cancer.

But the researchers said their approach is equivalent to so-called therapeutic cloning, which uses cloning technology to create perfectly matched cell transplants. Last month a team at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York said they used the cloning approach to treat Parkinson's in mice.

It's a big breakthrough, but wouldn't it be simpler to just create real embryos to fix people, from their own DNA/cellular material?

Oh wait, we can't do that, because God in his infinite wisdom wants us to suffer and die. So sayeth the religious right.

At least until they get sick.

Source: Raw Story

Watery
Our water infrastructure is as badly off as our roads, trains, bridges, power, energy production and agriculture, it seems.

The Environmental Protection Agency says utilities will need to invest more than $277 billion over the next two decades on repairs and improvements to drinking water systems. Water industry engineers put the figure drastically higher, at about $480 billion.

Water utilities, largely managed by city governments, have never faced improvements of this magnitude before. And customers will have to bear the majority of the cost through rate increases, according to the American Water Works Association, an industry group.

Engineers say this is a crucial era for the nation's water systems, especially in older cities like New York, where some pipes and tunnels were built in the 1800s and are now nearing the end of their life expectancies.

This isn't entirely the fault of the GOP, but their constant 'lower taxes, fewer services' mantra has hurt a lot.

On the brighter side, check out the amusing anecdote they start the story with.

Two hours north of New York City, a mile-long stream and a marsh the size of a football field have mysteriously formed along a country road. They are such a marvel that people come from miles around to drink the crystal-clear water, believing it is bubbling up from a hidden natural spring.

The truth is far less romantic: The water is coming from a cracked 70-year-old tunnel hundreds of feet below ground, scientists say.

The tunnel is leaking up to 36 million gallons a day as it carries drinking water from a reservoir to the big city. It is a powerful warning sign of a larger problem around the country: The infrastructure that delivers water to the nation's cities is badly aging and in need of repairs.

People are so stupid they will drive out of their way to drink MYSTERIOUS WATER.

Man, where's dysentery when you need it?

Source: Raw Story

Lies
So the Pentagon is issuing a new 'lie detector' to troops in Iraq, whose results will be used to help make life and death decisions.

Pity it doesn't work worth a damn and the whole thing is a con.

planning to give US troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan "hand-held lie detectors" aimed at rooting out potential insurgents and terrorists. But polygraph experts doubt the system's accuracy and Defense Department memos show results of the few tests that were run were manipulated to demonstrate more success with them than was achieved, according to an MSNBC investigative reporter.

"The Defense Department says the portable device isn't perfect, but is accurate enough to save American lives by screening local police officers, interpreters and allied forces for access to U.S. military bases, and by helping narrow the list of suspects after a roadside bombing," MSNBC's Bill Dedman reports. "The device has already been tried in Iraq and is expected to be deployed there as well."

The Pentagon argues the portable polygraphs have accuracy rates up to 90 percent, but Dedman reports the military arrived at those figures by omitting some results from the tests. The Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening System, or PCASS, uses a hand-held computer that analyzes readings from censors attached to an interviewees hand and wrist. The computer displays "Green" if it believes the person is honest, "Red" if they are being deceptive and "Yellow" if it is unsure.

The Pentagon, in a PowerPoint presentation released to msnbc.com through a Freedom of Information Act request, says the PCASS is 82 to 90 percent accurate. Those are the only accuracy numbers that were sent up the chain of command at the Pentagon before the device was approved.

But Pentagon studies obtained by msnbc.com show a more complicated picture: In calculating its accuracy, the scientists conducting the tests discarded the yellow screens, or inconclusive readings.

That practice was criticized in the 2003 National Academy study, which said the "inconclusives" have to be included to measure accuracy. If you take into account the yellow screens, the PCASS accuracy rate in the three Pentagon-funded tests drops to the level of 63 to 79 percent.

63 percent. That's the best they can manage?

People are going to DIE because of this device. Our guys and Iraqi civilians. We're going to see actual bombers let go and innocent people shot, all because the Pentagon wanted to roll out a shiny toy.

Shameful.

Source: Raw Story

More Hep
Basically, 'Made in China' means 'DO NOT CONSUME' these days.

More than 100 people have died from taking the blood thinner heparin, the Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday, after imports of the drug were halted due to contamination linked to production in China.

The 103 deaths reported to the FDA of patients who had been using heparin occurred between January 2007 and February 2008, the agency said on its website. Sixty-two of those deaths were reported to have involved allergic reactions.

The FDA on March 5 said it had detected an unidentified contaminant in heparin injections sold by Baxter International pharmaceuticals.

It was determined that most of the active ingredients in the drug came from a plant in Changzou, China working with Wisconsin-based Scientific Protein Laboratories, which supplies Baxter.

Nice job, FDA. Nice job screening our medicine supply.

Source: Raw Story

Quasars
An article about quasars, which apparently dwarfed hypernovae in terms of raw power. I apologize to quasars for not paying them enough attention.

On the other hand, they apparently no longer exist, so hypernovae are still the current champs.

Source: The Independent

Polar Bear Madness
So apparently the Germans have a polar bear war on their hands.

You might not think it, to look at these cuddly pictures, but the prospect of a polar bear "war" was looming large over Germany yesterday.

Flocke, a recently born cub who caught the public imagination by being rejected by parents and raised by humans, was making a long-awaited public debut – accompanied by her keepers, including Horst Maussner (right), before a 350-strong crowd of excited press photographers, TV camera crews and cheering fans. The four month-old female, whose name translates as "snowflake", has been described by the local media as the arch rival, in the battle for Germany's public affection, to Knut – another polar bear cub, who was born at Berlin Zoo in 2006 and also raised entirely by humans.

At present, Knut can still claim the title of world's most famous polar bear (after all, a Hollywood film has been made about him), but Flocke is catching up fast. Her backers spent yesterday plastering Nuremberg with hundreds of pink posters bearing a suitably cuddly image of Flocke and the barbed message, "Knut was yesterday".

Honestly Germans, is there nothing you can't fight about?

Meanwhile it seems there's a campaign against raising these bears with human keepers.

While some insist that bears born in zoos have a right to human intervention to save and secure their lives, others such as the German animal rights activist, Frank Albrecht argue that they become so dependent on man that they end up divorced from nature and turn into hyperactive, disturbed freaks.

"Knut is a problem bear who has become addicted to human beings," he said.

The German zoologist Peter Arras has described Knut as a "psychopath".

The debate has grown following the birth of three polar bear cubs at Nuremberg Zoo to two different female bears. A team of highly experienced zoologists initially argued that nature must be allowed to take its course. They allowed one of the females, which had rejected its two cubs, to kill and eat her offspring because they were too weak to survive.

But the zoo's "bear infanticide" policy coincided with television pictures designed to melt the heart of anybody who cannot help assuming that polar bears are just like human beings. They showed the zoo's other female polar bear, Vera, carrying her female cub, called Flocke or Snowflake, by the scruff of its neck through her enclosure.

Within hours of the images being broadcast, Nuremberg Zoo had performed a complete policy U-turn: a keeper was sent into Vera's enclosure and Flocke was removed "for its own safety". Amid growing fears that the last remaining cub might also be eaten the zoo promptly announced that the cub would be fed from a bottle.

"I don't think anyone could have stood it, if we had allowed our last bear cub to be eaten by its mum," said Nuremberg's deputy mayor.

I'm not sure a dead bear is inherently better than a live one. It's entirely possible that in the wild the mother bear would have been less stressed and not eaten them.

In any case, Knut's mother was a disturbed circus reject. There's nothing 'natural' about that. You might as well save him as not, given the circumstances.

Finally, the article repeats the old canard that polar bears aren't in trouble.

Sigmar Gabriel, Germany's Environment Minister, has adopted the bear, claiming him as a symbol of the world's endangered species. Yet evidence suggests that polar bears are not facing extinction, even if the ice caps are melting. Alaska. home to a fifth of the world's 25,000 polar bears, currently has its largest bear population in 40 years.

Sigh. From my post about Glen Beck:

There is currently an estimated 20,000-25,000 polar bears worldwide who are threatened with “losing their habitat and becoming extinct over the next 50 years” because of global warming and melting sea ice. The U.S. Geological Survey predicts that without action, “11 of the 19 subpopulations will be extinct by the middle of this century, with an additional three subpopulations vanishing shortly thereafter.”

Those flakes at the USGS! You know they're just a bunch of dirty hippies.

Source: The Independent
The Independent

H Plane
So Boeing has developed a hydrogen powered plane. Sort of.

The first aircraft to use only a hydrogen battery for power in the air has successfully completed a test flight. The US company Boeing said that the flight, in Ocaña, central Spain, was “a historical technological success for Boeing [and] full of promises for a greener future”.

The aircraft, which is capable of carrying two people and has a wingspan of 16 metres (52ft), flew at 100km/h (62mph) for 20 minutes. Hydrogen power involves fuel cells using the energy produced from the transformation of hydrogen and oxygen into water. According to Boeing, it provides a cleaner and renewable energy resource because it produces only water vapour as waste.

The director of the Boeing research centre at Ocaña, Francisco EscartÍ, said that hydrogen batteries could become the main source of energy for small aircraft, but that they were unlikely to power larger passenger aircraft.

In other words, it's a nice PR stunt. Nothing more.

Meanwhile of course you get the hydrogen propaganda about 'only water vapor as waste'. Nevermind that you make hydrogen by splitting water with huge amounts of electricity. Which you get from power plants.

Most of which burn fossil fuels.

Which aren't exactly clean.

Idiots.

Source: The Times Online

Advancing the Frontiers of Retroactive Cartography
It's a new field, but as with so many dubious things, the South leads the way.

Lawmakers in drought-parched Georgia voted Friday to ask mapmakers to redraw their state's northern boundary in hopes of tapping the Tennessee River, in a vote that potentially escalates a conflict with their neighbor.

If negotiations fail, the bill would authorize Georgia's top attorney to file a lawsuit to try forcing a boundary change.

The House and Senate both approved the measure on the legislative session's final day. It now goes to Gov. Sonny Perdue, who has not said whether he supports it.

Congress in 1796 designated that Tennessee's southern borders stretch along the 35th parallel, but surveyors in 1818 were a bit off the mark. They now know that the border was placed about 1.1 miles south of where it should be.

The resolution asserts that the flawed survey mistakenly placed Georgia's northern line just short of the Tennessee River, which has about 15 times greater flow than the one burgeoning Atlanta depends on for water.

Tennessee hasn't taken kindly to Georgia's drought-inspired bid; lawmakers there have reacted with a mix of scorn and humor.

This instead of facing their lack of infrastructure like adults, building reservoirs and the like.

If Georgia can't solve a problem by cheating, they might have to work hard! That sucks! It would take time away from their banjo practice and moonshine distillation!

Source: Raw Story

Dimwit Analysis
So a misanthropic jerk at The Reg thinks that Al Gore's green initiatives will be bad for the public because they'll create high paying jobs.

What?

Al Gore is unleashing the climate campaign you can't ignore, in the shape of www.wecansolveit.org, which will spend $300 million to sign up some millions of people who will march, write letters and like, agitate. In the face of this government and business will be forced - the plan goes - to take climate change seriously.

Clearly it's all being done for the very best of reasons: no man could need more than a Nobel and an Oscar to assure him of his status. But all that money being spent to get governments to do as Al Gore thinks they should ought to give us pause for thought.

And unfortunately, there's a flaw at the heart of the plan - a failure of economic logic which rather undermines the justification for the whole campaign:

"Thousands of new companies, millions of new jobs, and billions in revenue generated by solutions to the climate crisis - this is the clean energy economy we can adopt with today's technologies, resources, know-how, and leadership from our elected officials."

Leave aside the absurdity of our (or anyone elses') elected officials being able to create jobs, companies or revenues: if they could they wouldn't be elected representatives, would they? They'd be off getting rich. Look rather at those claims that the plan will create all those jobs, all those revenues: they clearly think that this is a good idea, a benefit of the plan. But it isn't a benefit, it's a cost.

Because everyone wants to be a rich businessman! Nobody ever does anything for altruistic reasons, or base power, ambition and advancement!

But all three of them are making the same error, what Bastiat in 1850 (clearly, 158 years isn't long enough for such a simple point to sink into politicians' brains) called the Broken Window Fallacy, or as it is sometimes known, the make work fallacy. For, as I say, all those jobs, all those revenues, are properly counted as a cost of such schemes, not a benefit.

When we come to evaluate a plan we need to know how wonderfully fabulous the results are going to be. I'm certainly not going to try and argue that a richer world without the threat of climate change would be less than wonderfully fabulous. But as well as that elysian future, we have to work out what it is going to cost us to get from here to there. That means being very careful in how we work out what are the costs. It might still be a good idea, just as it might not be, but this is exactly what our cost benefit analysis is designed to tell us: will it all be worth it?

Al's actual campaign will certainly be worth it: the dweebs that populate the green movement need opportunities to congregate and repopulate just as much as any other unfortunate section of society: otherwise who will the next generation buy their burgers from? But will the actions we are being urged to take be worth it?

HAHA dirty hippies always end up working at McDonalds HA HA HA my 150 year old economics will shatter their dirty dreams!

So consider what happens when we 'create' millions of jobs. Yes, certainly, millions of people then have jobs. That's wonderful for them of course, although quite why everyone insists that it is a good idea that these are 'high paying”' jobs rather escapes: that rather means that whoever is buying their products (i.e., us) is paying more than if they were low paying jobs. But much more important is what is unseen here. What would those people be doing if they weren't doing these newly created jobs? Something else, certainly, we've not just sown dragon's teeth to create these new workers now, have we? And what was it that they were doing previously?

Yes, it's better that people (other than the author of course) work cheap, so he can afford lots of cheap swag to line his apartment!

Everyone else can go fuck themselves!

Things are a little different if all those who take these jobs were previously in involuntary unemployment, but mass unemployment isn't something that's all that prevalent in either the US or the UK.

Check the latest figures for the US there, Kreskin. Unemployment is up SHARPLY. A huge number of people aren't even counted on the rolls as they've GIVEN UP HOPE ENTIRELY. Meanwhile, job creation has been consistently below new job seekers for about two years.

But other than being factually wrong, please, continue.

Certainly not amongst the skilled workers who would be needed to design, build and install the new glorious renewable energy systems, at least. So all of our new found workforce would have in fact come from doing something else. It doesn't really matter what else either, not to make the basic point. For we lose whatever else it was that they were doing at the same time as we gain our bright shiny new energy system. They might have been wiping babies' bottoms, stacking shelves at Albertson's or working to cure cancer. Whatever it was, that they are now not doing those things is a cost to us: smelly babies, the Great Famine that would follow Albertson's running out of food, the cancer that will get about a third of us, these are all costs.

See? You should give up your hope of gainful, meaningful employment so you can stock his shelves and wipe his baby's ass!

Or cure cancer. It's not like doctors are already a highly skilled and paid profession... oh wait. So they already DO contribute to higher costs and job defection from stocking grocery shelves!

The fiends!

They might indeed be bearable costs, they might even be worthwhile costs, it might make perfect sense for us to incur them to stop Manhattan from sinking under the waves: but costs they are and as costs we have to account for them.

Which is what makes all the willy waving so silly: what we actually want is someone to come up with a plan that doesn't create new jobs, one that doesn't cause us losses elsewhere. We actually want people to be boasting about how their plan destroys jobs, want what no man has yet done, people to boast of their micro-dicks. As, say, supermarkets themselves have:

"The New Economics Foundation has calculated that every £50,000 spent in small local shops creates one job. You must spend £250,000 in superstores for the same result."

How excellent, eh? Supermarkets use fewer resources (for the labour of a human being is most certainly a resource) but get the same job done. Our retail requirements are catered for and instead of five people working to do so, only one is. The other four are able to go off and wipe bottoms and/or cure cancer. We thus get both our groceries and fresh smelling babies (and perhaps that cancer cure will come before my Marlboros kick in). Excellent, we're richer, all of us as a society, by using less labour to complete a task.

That is why these claims of job creation should be treated as costs, not benefits, when we try to evaluate these schemes and, similarly, why the boosters of these plans are guilty of economic illogic.

Yes, it's great that people get trapped in dead end, low paying supermarket jobs forever, rather than own their own stores and contribute to their local communities in the form of taxes.

We should be on our knees THANKING Wal-Mart et all for their grotesque concentration of wealth at the top! It keeps productivity up by turning our towns and cities into wastelands of misery and poverty!

This is very closely related to the concept of opportunity cost: you can only use a resource, the labour of a person for example, to do one thing at one time. Which means that there is indeed a huge benefit to Al running this WE thing: if he's doing that he can't run for President again. Lucky, eh?

Oh yes, it's much better that we have a moron Texas-transplant oil man who has plunged the Middle East into a hellstorm of violence and death. What's a million Iraqi corpses as long as we don't have some DIRTY HIPPY running the country into the ground with his high paying jobs and clean energy programs?

THANK GOD WE AVOIDED THAT TRAGEDY

This is one of the stupidest, most selfish, narcissistic loads of crap I have ever read in my life. It stands as some of the rankest hypocrisy on record. What does the author do for a living, you might ask? How does he contribute to the lowering of wages and rise of efficiency?

Tim Worstall knows more about rare metals than most might think wise, and writes for himself at timworstall.com, and for The Business, among others. He is a Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute.

Oh, he's a web columnist, psuedo economist and writer!

For shame, Tim! You could be wiping baby ass!

Idiot. Colossally elitist idiot.

Source: The Register

Pinch
I need to get one of these.

Many high-voltage electronics enthusiasts make their own devices using pulsed power techniques to produce a theta pinch capable of crushing an aluminium soft drink can by pressure of strong magnetic field. (Warning! High-voltage electric shocks may be lethal).

An electromagnetic aluminium can crusher consists of four main components (1) A high voltage DC power supply which provides a source of electrical energy (2) A large energy discharge capacitor to accumulate the electrical energy (3) A high voltage switch or spark gap and (4) A robust coil (capable of surviving high magnetic pressure) through which the stored electrical energy can be quickly discharged in order to generate a correspondingly strong pinching magnetic field (see diagram below).

Of course, I'd want to use the magnetic field for evil, not can crushing.

Source: Wikipedia

Venus
Results out of the ESA's Venus Express probe suggest that Venus lost its water too quickly to become Earthlike.

In the early stages of the Solar System, Venus seems to have evolved very rapidly compared to the Earth. Data from Venus Express supports the theory that the Earth’s twin once had significant volume of water covering the surface but it appears that these oceans were lost in a very short geological timescale.

As a result of the loss of water, the geological evolution of the surface of Venus slowed right down because it was unable to develop plate tectonics like the Earth. Biological evolution was prevented altogether. Thus, in terms of Venus being another Earth in climate and habitability terms, it evolved too quickly at first, then too slowly.

'They may have started out looking very much the same,' said Professor Taylor, 'but increasingly we have evidence that Venus lost most of its water and Earth lost most of its atmospheric carbon dioxide.'

Bummer.

From what I';ve read the Earth, if it lived long enough, would die the same way, as plate tectonics constantly sips at our water supply where ocean plates plunge into the earth. Some water gets sucked down and locked up too where it lubricates the plate movement, and thus, eventually, there's no more water to be sucked, which would lock up the plates like Venus.

Of course we'll probably have been burnt to a cinder by then, so who cares much.

Source: Science Daily

First Korean Astronaut
The article focuses on fluff, but the event is worth noting. South Korea's first astronaut will be going up to the ISS soon.

South Korea's first astronaut said Monday on the eve of her launch to the International Space Station (ISS) that she will celebrate arrival in space by singing for her fellow crew.

"We will have food on April 12 on the Day of Cosmonauts and I will sing but it's a secret what is the song," Yi So-Yeon, 29, said at a press conference at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan where she is set to blast off on Tuesday.

Yi, who has listed singing as one of her hobbies, said her first reaction on reaching the ISS would be to cry out: "Wow!"

She also told reporters that she hoped people in North Korea would share in the "triumph" of her mission, which starts Tuesday when she blasts up into space on a Russian Soyuz rocket.

A South Korean space official said that Yi's 12-day mission would cost South Korea around 20 million dollars (12.8 million euros) and that he hoped the flight would help further his country's manned space flight ambitions.

An official committee headed by Anatoly Perminov, the head of the Russian space agency Roskosmos, gave official approval Monday for the mission by Yi and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko.

The three astronauts spoke to the press from behind a glass screen at the Hotel Cosmonaut in Baikonur as they are being held in quarantine for fear of being contaminated ahead of their space flight.

Russians celebrate Cosmonaut Day on April 12, the day Soviet hero Yury Gagarin became the first man in space, in 1961. Yi, Volkov and Kononenko will be blasting off from the same launch pad as Gagarin.

Good for South Korea, I suppose. Manned space flight doesn't accomplish much in the way of science, but there are worse ways to spend that much money.

Abstinence education, creationist museums, paying Karl Rove...

Source: Raw Story

Terror
The Japanese have come up with a bank that has a face, eats your money, and looks like The Book of the Dead from Evil Dead.

Seriously, someone should reskin and reprogram it to spout lines from the movies. It'd be sweet.

An earlier entry in this article mentions an 'AI' that learns how to control your devices and respond to voice commands.

Which could be handy for my future evil lair.

Source: PC World

Uwe Promise?
Uwe Boll, one of the worst directors alive, and sometimes called the Ed Wood of our day, has stated that he will retire from moviemaking if a million people petition him to do so.

WE MUST DO THIS FOR THE GOOD OF MANKIND.

Source: /Film

Wastes of Human Skin Around the World

2008-04-09T13:32:00.003-04:00

Jerks!

Insanity, Utter
What in the world could motivate someone to say something like this, in public no less.

Some 1,000 people attended a memorial service at the Mercaz Harav rabbinical seminary Thursday, marking the one-month anniversary of the murderous attack which claimed the lives of eight young men.

Also attending the service were many prominent rabbis of the Religious Zionist Movement, who were not shy about expressing their rage against the government's policy.

Rabbi Yaakov Shapira, head of the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, chose to explain the attack by saying that "the Torah and the land of Israel are acquired only through agony."

Former Sephardi chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu called on the government to decree that for every life lost in the attack another yeshiva and township will be formed.

"Even when we seek revenge, it is important to make one thing clear – the life of one yeshiva boy is worth more than the lives of 1,000 Arabs.

"The Talmud states that if gentiles rob Israel of silver they will pay it back in gold, and all that is taken will be paid back in folds, but in cases like these there is nothing to pay back, since as I said – the life of one yeshiva boy is worth more than the lives of 1,000 Arabs," added Rabbi Eliyahu.

A prominent religious leader said this. In a public gathering. And no one shouted him down.

Amazing. Thankfully there are moderate voices speaking out too, right?

Ramat Gan's chief rabbi, Yaacov Ariel, chose to deliver a more moderate message: "We do not seek vengeance, we seek retaliation. The terrorist's house should have been demolished immediately, regardless of the law. It should have been done because it was a matter of life and death – the deterrence could help save future lives."

"We are against killing innocent people or harming children," he added, "but once terrorists hide behind children, we have to strike back. The blood of those living in Sderot is worth just as much as the blood of those the terrorists hide behind."

He's referring to a vigilante mob that went to the house of the killer and tried to murder his entire family and raze his house to the ground.

That's the moderate position; kill a criminal's entire family. The hardline position is to kill a thousand innocent people of a 'lesser race' for every one you lose.

Once again, I state merely for the record: Israel is not our friend.

Individual Israelis? Of course. Israeli society as a whole? Never.

(The South is much the same way really)

Source: Ynet News

Security Guard
Now we move on to a more petty form of casual evil from our own Republican Party (also not our friends).

During a public appearance on Saturday, Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) belittled a U.S. soldier in Iraq who was following orders and wouldn’t let McHenry go to the gym without the proper credentials. McHenry referred to the guard as a “two-bit security guard“:

We spent the night in the Green Zone, in the poolhouse of one of Saddam’s palaces. A little weird, I got to be honest with you. But I felt safe. And so in the morning, I got up early — not that I make this a great habit — but I went to the gym because I just couldn’t sleep and everything else. Well, sure enough, the guard wouldn’t let me in. Said I didn’t have the correct credentials.

It’s 5:00 in the morning. I haven’t had sleep. I was not very happy with this two-bit security guard. So you know, I said, “I want to see your supervisor.” Thirty minutes later, the supervisor wasn’t happy with me, they escort me back to my room. It happens. I guess I didn’t need to work out anyway.

How dare the lowly soldier question him, the Lord and Master of A North Carolina District? Doesn't he know how to treat his social betters? So what if Milord McHenry (R-Douchebagistan) didn't have his ID? Surely a servant should know the faces of all his masters!

But the GOP is the party of The Troops. Riiiiight.

Source: Think Progress

Lunatic Renders Satire Obsolete
Stephen Colbert probably thought that, when he started his comedic crusade against Bears, that he had found a bogeyman so comically absurd that no one could possibly take him seriously.

Alas, Glen Beck has found a new source of terror to wet himself about.

Last night on his CNN Headline News show, right-wing pundit Glenn Beck hosted global warming skeptic Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). Beck allowed Inhofe to rant about how — with “all the liberals” running the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works — he was forced to sit through hearings on “that nice white fuzzy polar bear.”

Inhofe argued that the polar bear population isn’t endangered. “[I]f anything, it’s an overpopulation problem,” said Inhofe. Beck then jumped in and claimed that, in fact, the extinction of polar bears may be a good thing:

They eat people! For the love of Pete, they’re big, angry bears. They eat people. Not that I say we go out and kill all of them, but I mean, it doesn’t seem to be a problem here. Senator, I can’t take the — I can’t take the lies anymore.

There is currently an estimated 20,000-25,000 polar bears worldwide who are threatened with “losing their habitat and becoming extinct over the next 50 years” because of global warming and melting sea ice. The U.S. Geological Survey predicts that without action, “11 of the 19 subpopulations will be extinct by the middle of this century, with an additional three subpopulations vanishing shortly thereafter.”

On Wednesday, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne skipped a Senate hearing on listing the polar bear as a threatened species. His agency missed a Jan. 9 deadline to decide on classifying the polar bear, in violation of the Endangered Species Act, according to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA).

Inhofe is a famous loon on climate issues, but this bear thing is a new one for, well, everybody. Except Colbert, who is probably having a hard time dealing with the way he has to keep moving the Crazy Goalposts to stay ahead of the right wing.

Source: Think Progress

Mugabe
Ahh, a classic. The inept, bumbling, hyper-corrupt dictator offering to step down in exchange for immunity and getting to keep all his stolen stuff.

Robert Mugabe's aides have told Zimbabwe's opposition leaders that he is prepared to give up power in return for guarantees, including immunity from prosecution for past crimes.

But the aides have warned that if the Movement for Democratic Change does not agree then Mugabe is threatening to declare emergency rule and force another presidential election in 90 days, according to senior opposition sources.

Then of course there's the stick; if the oppo doesn't agree to his demands, he'll negate their election win and try to murder them all.

Really, if history's not cyclical, it certainly is repetitive.

Source: The Guardian

Huh?
Right wing commentator Hugh Hewitt, trying to find fault with a Hillary speech.

I played excerpts from Hillary's speech from today, in which she references "hurling" her "bookbag" across her room at college on hearing of the assassination of MLK, as well as wearing a black arm band in a protest march in Boston in the aftermath of the murder.

Listeners are e-mailing skepticism about their being bookbags and arm bands in 1968. I have no opinion, being 12 at the time. E-mail evidence to hugh@hughhewitt.com

Bookbags and arm bands? In 1968?

Why, they only had stone tablets and mammoth pelts in 1968! Clearly she's a liar!

If only there was a famous historial example of students and arm bands in the 1960s that could settle this difficult question for Mr. Hewitt. Oh, if only

MR. JUSTICE FORTAS delivered the opinion of the Court.

Petitioner John F. Tinker, 15 years old, and petitioner Christopher Eckhardt, 16 years old, attended high schools in Des Moines, Iowa. Petitioner Mary Beth Tinker, John's sister, was a 13-year-old student in junior high school.

In December 1965, a group of adults and students in Des Moines held a meeting at the Eckhardt home. The group determined to publicize their objections to the hostilities in Vietnam and their support for a truce by wearing black armbands during the holiday season and by fasting on December 16 and New Year's Eve. Petitioners and their parents had previously engaged in similar activities, and they decided to participate in the program.

The principals of the Des Moines schools became aware of the plan to wear armbands. On December 14, 1965, they met and adopted a policy that any student wearing an armband to school would be asked to remove it, and if he refused he would be suspended until he returned without the armband. Petitioners were aware of the regulation that the school authorities adopted.

On December 16, Mary Beth and Christopher wore black armbands to their schools. John Tinker wore his armband the next day. They were all sent home and suspended from school until they would come back without their armbands. They did not return to school until after the planned period for wearing armbands had expired--that is, until after New Year's Day.

That's right! It's Tinker v. Des Moines School District, the landmark 1969 case which strongly held that students in public school do in fact have political rights!

First Amendment rights, applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment, are available to teachers and students. It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.

One of the most important legal decisions in the modern era! One of the most famous court cases of the decade!

Ahh, right wingers. So astoundingly ignorant.

Moron.

Sources: Instaputz
Boston College (though you can get the Tinker ruling about ten million places, it was just the first Google hit)

Saudi Idiots
So the Saudis are looking to murder a Canadian kid.

A Saudi Arabian court convicted a 17-year-old Canadian for involvement in the murder of a classmate and sentenced him on Saturday to a year in prison and 200 lashes, his father and lawyer said.

The boy's older brother, Mohammed Kohail, was already convicted on March 4 in the murder, and sentenced to death by beheading, along with a third man, a Jordanian.

Canada has said it would seek clemency for Mohammad, 23.

Mohammad and his younger brother, Sultan Kohail, 17, were detained in January 2007 after a school yard brawl resulted in the death of another student from internal injuries.

According to one of the defense lawyers, Mohammad had gone to the school to pick up his brother when a group of young men started harassing the younger boy. A scuffle ensued during which a Syrian classmate, Munther al-Haraki, died.

Sultan was sentenced to a year in prison and to 200 lashes, both the boy's father, Ali Kohail, and lawyer, Saleh al-Ghamdi, told The Associated Press.

...

Saudi Arabia follows a strict interpretation of Islam under which people convicted of murder, drug trafficking, rape and armed robbery can be executed, usually with a sword. So far this year, 36 people have been executed in the kingdom.

Canada abolished the death penalty in 1976.

Canada did, but not us!

The United States and Saudi Arabia really do have something in common!

Seriously, a bunch of kids get in a fight, one dies. You want to kill someone for that? For what is obviously some sort of manslaughter?

Prison term I can understand, but death by beheading? Are they insane?

Oh wait. It's Saudi Arabia. Of course they are.

Source: Raw Story

Gag Rule
Disgusting.

A prominent public health school has restored the word "abortion" as an acceptable search term on a reproductive health Web site funded by a federal agency that restricts references to abortions.

The move by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health follows criticism from some health advocates and librarians that the restriction amounted to censorship.

The restriction on the POPLINE Web site — "population information online" — had been put in place after inquiries by the United States Agency for International Development, which funds the site, according to a statement from Dr. Michael J. Klag, the dean of the Bloomberg school.

USAID denies funding to non-governmental organizations that perform or actively promote abortion as a methods of family planning in other nations. The policy was started under President Ronald Reagan and was revived when President Bush took office in 2001.

This is what's known as the 'Global Gag Rule', that is to say, if you even mention that abortions exist, you can't get money to help people. Aid agencies in Africa and so forth are required to deceive and mislead their female patients, if necessary allow them to suffer and die from pregnancies rather than get abortions.

That's the compassion in compassionate conservatism. Now it hits Americans too. Sigh.

Source: Raw Story

France Has Them Too

Vandals desecrated 148 Muslim graves in France's biggest war cemetery, hanging a pig's head from one tombstone and daubing slogans insulting France's Muslim justice minister, officials said Sunday.

President Nicolas Sarkozy expressed "profound outrage" at the "sordid" attack on the Muslim quarter of the Notre Dame de Lorette cemetery, near the northern town of Arras on Saturday night. He vowed that those responsible would be punished.

The cemetery is France's biggest military graveyards and commemorates tens of thousands of victims of a series of long and bloody battles for control of northern France at the start of World War I.

The attack came almost exactly a year after a similar incident in which neo-Nazi vandals scrawled swastikas on 52 of the cemetery's Muslim graves.

...

Prior to 2007, there were four incidents involving the desecration of Muslim graves in northern and eastern France in 2004, and one in 2003.

There have also been several attacks on Jewish graves in cemeteries across France in recent years.

Just goes to show that wherever you have xenophobic conservative politics, you get mind-numbing crime. France has had a really bad run of arch-conservative Muslim bashing in recent years, and here you see the end result.

Source: Raw Story

Hitchens
Legendary drunkard and all around jerk Christopher Hitchens was on MSNBC the other day, which can only mean the bars were closed. He made a fool of himself as usual.

Summary: On MSNBC's Tim Russert, responding to Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan said, "And now you've made me forget my second point," to which Hitchens replied, "Oh, well, don't be such a lesbian. Get on with it."

I'm not even sure what's going on here. Andrew Sullivan is a well known and somewhat idiotic gay conservative. Is Hitchens insulting him for being gay? Confused about his gender? Does he think lesbians have conversational trouble?

Seriously. He's so wasted he isn't even making sense in his offensive comments.

Source: Think Progress

El Presidente Doesn't Just Outsource Our Jobs

The CIA secretly transported at least 14 war on terror detainees to Jordan between 2001 and 2004, making it the top "rendition" destination at that time, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday.

"While a handful of countries received persons rendered by the United States during this period, no other country is believed to have held as many as Jordan," the rights group said in a statement.

The prisoners were interrogated and tortured by Jordan's General Intelligence Department, according to a new Human Rights Watch report that documents eight previously unknown cases of rendition.

...

The report includes an excerpt of a note handwritten by a rendered prisoner while in Jordanian custody in late 2002. The prisoner is now at the US war on terror prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi wrote that GID interrogators beat him "in a way that does not know any limits."

"They threatened me with electricity, with snakes and dogs .... [They said] we'll make you see death .... They threatened to rape me," the note said.

A common torture method was falaqa, by which prisoners are given extended beatings on the bottoms of their feet.

"Just about everyone at GID was beaten with sticks," a Jordanian former prisoner told Human Rights Watch. "People were beaten on their feet. They did it in the basement."

"Outsourcing torture is not only wrong, it's illegal," Mariner said. "And the US can't say it doesn't torture if it sends people to countries that do."

So naive. Of course it can! And will! Even with St. John McCain, himself a torture survivor! American hypocrisy (the Republicans call it 'American Exceptionalism') knows no earthly bounds!

Source: Raw Story

Mukasey is a LIAR
Well, either that, or the Bush administration actually did cover up the WTC attacks.

I just received the following statement from the Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Rep. Lee Hamilton, in response to my inquiries last week (and numerous follow-up inquiries from readers here) about Attorney General Michael Mukasey's claims about the 9/11 attack and, specifically, about Mukasey's story that there was a pre-9/11 telephone call from an "Afghan safe house" into the U.S. that the Bush administration failed to intercept or investigate:
I am unfamiliar with the telephone call that Attorney General Mukasey cited in his appearance in San Francisco on March 27. The 9/11 Commission did not receive any information pertaining to its occurrence.

...

In light of Hamilton's amazing comment, could journalists possibly now report on this story? One of two things is true about Mukasey's extraordinary claim about how and why the 9/11 attacks occurred. Either:

(1) The Bush administration concealed this obviously vital episode from the 9/11 Commission and from everyone else, until Mukasey tearfully trotted it out last week; or,

(2) Mukasey, the nation's highest law enforcement officer, made this story up in order to scare and manipulate Americans into believing that FISA and other surveillance safeguards caused the 9/11 attacks and therefore the Government should be given more unchecked spying powers.

It's binary, folks. Either Mukasey was lying, or Bush actually did cover up the true origins of the Buildings Go Boom day attacks.

We live in an unprecedented era for jerks.

Source: Glenn Greenwald

George Will
A man who just doesn't care about a few dead union workers.

Yesterday George Bush signed a "fast track" bill that allows him to force a vote within 90 days with no amendments from Congress on the Columbia Free Trade Agreement. George Will is visibly aroused at the sight, and takes the opportunity to have a swing at both Obama and unions:

Nevertheless, U.S. unions oppose the agreement, probably to preserve the moral clarity of their monomania: Damn the details, full speed ahead in opposing more free-trade agreements, anywhere, anytime. Colombia, America's best South American ally, shares a border with America's most aggressive South American enemy, Hugo Chávez's Venezuela.

Colombia's president, Álvaro Uribe, has made stunning progress against the drug cartels, right-wing militias and FARC, the 9,000-man Marxist terrorist group that is financed by drug smuggling and kidnapping. But Obama, nimble at the art of enveloping the courtship of interest groups in clouds of high-mindedness, says Colombia has not done enough to protect its trade unionists.

Colombia's unions, however, document that the number of murders of their members has sharply declined. Edward Schumacher-Matos, visiting professor of Latin American studies at Harvard, notes that "it was far safer to be in a union than to be an ordinary citizen in Colombia last year": The murder rate of unionists was less than one-eighth the murder rate of Colombians generally.

Meanwhile, the facts on the ground seem to be a bit different.

Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, according to Escuela Nacional Sindical (ENS), a highly regarded labor institute based in Medellin, Colombia. Two thousand, two hundred and sixty two union officers and rank-and-file members have been brutally and systematically murdered since 1991. More than 400 trade unionists have been murdered since President Uribe took office in 2002, including forty in 2007 for exercising their fundamental right to form unions for a better life. In those cases where the perpetrator is known, government-supported paramilitary organizations or the armed forces or police are most often responsible.

That's right, only a few hundred dead unionists under the benevolent Uribe.

That's all.

And that's fine with George Will!

Source: Firedoglake

Gene Weingarten
Gene Weingarten won a Pulitzer for his odious article about how ignorant the working man is.

_ Feature writing, for Gene Weingarten's story on world-class violinist Joshua Bell, who, in an experiment, played beautiful music in a subway station just to see who commuters would react;

On its surface, Weingarten's story is designed to make you feel wistful about the sad state of humanity. That's the goal, to confuse the issue, to write a seemingly banal but harmless lamentation about modernity.

But a closer look reveals yet another elitist jerk. Weingarten staged his 'experiment' at a busy subway stop during rush hour. He then castigates all the people on the way to work who don't stop, miss their trains, arrive late at their jobs and possibly get fired, for not appreciating the music he considers important.

He just assumes that everyone has the liberty to waste the day away on leisure. He also assumes that his taste in leisure and culture is definitive.

And the Pulitzer people just signed off on it. Reprehensible.

You'll note he didn't try his experiment outside an investment bank, or a fancy restaurant. No no; he knows that the upper classes have respect for culture. He has to see what the lowly, common man thinks.

I'll tell you what they might be thinking. They might think that a guy who judges them so harshly for having work and lives is a colossal asshole.

Source: Raw Story

Chris Matthews
Well, the loudmouthed jerk who made his bones on the Lewinsky scandal, well-known egotist and misogynist Chris Matthews, has a big feature biographical piece in the upcoming NYT magazine. A couple of highlights:

"People are a little impressed with themselves," Griffin went on to say, continuing his commentary about the scene. "It's a bit of an echo chamber." Matthews is central to that echo chamber -- at the Ritz, as in the 2008 presidential campaign. He is, in a sense, the carnival barker at the center of it, spewing tiny pellets of chewed nuts across the table while comparing Obama to Mozart and Clinton to Salieri. At one point, Mat-thews suddenly became hypnotized by a TV over the bar set to a rebroadcast of "Hardball." "Hey, there I am -- it's me," he said, staring at himself on the screen. "It's me."

...

"Did you get a load of Lou Rawls's wife?" Matthews said as he left the spin room. Apparently the Rev. Jesse Jackson was introducing the widow of the R&B singer at the media center. "She was an absolute knockout," Matthews declared. It's a common Matthews designation. The actress Kerry Washington was also a "total knockout," according to Matthews, who by 1 a.m. had repaired to the bar of the Cleveland Ritz-Carlton. He was sipping a Diet Coke and holding court for a cluster of network and political types, as well as for a procession of random glad-handers that included, wouldn't you know it, Kerry Washington herself. Washington played Ray Charles's wife in the movie "Ray" and Kay Amin in the "Last King of Scotland." She is a big Obama supporter and was in town for the debate; more to the point, she said she likes "Hard-ball." Matthews grabbed her hand, and Phil Griffin, the head of MSNBC who was seated across the table, vowed to get her on the show.

"I know why he wants you on," Matthews said to Washington while looking at Griffin. At which point Matthews did something he rarely does. He paused. He seemed actually to be considering what he was about to say. He might even have been editing himself, which is anything but a natural act for him. He was grimacing. I imagined a little superego hamster racing against a speeding treadmill inside Matthews's skull, until the superego hamster was overrun and the pause ended.

"He wants you on because you're beautiful," Matthews said. "And because you're black." He handed Washington a business card and told her to call anytime "if you ever want to hang out with Chris Matthews."

This is a man who was apparently only drinking DIET COKE. He's fascinated, Narcissus style, with his own reflection and strutting around like a horny dog, but he's only on DIET COKE.

God I'd hate to see him drunk.

Source: Media Bistro

You Can't Spell Lieberman Without 'Lie'
So Holy Joe Lieberman was losing the Democratic primary badly against Ned Lamont. As a last ditch measure on the day of the primary his website went down and he accused Lamont's web people of attacking and compromising it. Lamont's team said that was crap. The FBI investigated and never released the results. Now they have:

One of the stranger episodes of the Lieberman-Lamont primary in 2006 was the Lieberman campaign's charge that supporters of his rival (whose web guy, Tim Tagaris, is above) "attacked" Lieberman's website.

Anyway, the FBI has finally gotten to the bottom of it, in case you were wondering. The verdict: Not guilty.

So the FBI found out that Lamont didn't do it, and then they refused to say who did.

So who was to blame?

A federal investigation has concluded that U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman's 2006 re-election campaign was to blame for the crash of its Web site the day before Connecticut's heated Aug. 8 Democratic primary.

The FBI office in New Haven found no evidence supporting the Lieberman campaign's allegations that supporters of primary challenger Ned Lamont of Greenwich were to blame for the Web site crash.

Lieberman, who was fighting for his political life against the anti-Iraq war candidate Lamont, implied that joe2006.com was hacked by Lamont supporters.

"The server that hosted the joe2006.com Web site failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured. There was no evidence of (an) attack," according to the e-mail.

A program that could have detected a legitimate attack was improperly configured, the e-mail states.

"New Haven will be administratively closing this investigation," it concluded.

The e-mail, dated Oct. 25, 2006, was included in a technical packet of information recently sent to The Advocate in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act filed in late 2006 with the offices of state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and U.S. Attorney Kevin O'Connor.

The Advocate filed the requests after Blumenthal and O'Connor closed the case but declined to divulge details. They stated only that they found no evidence that Lamont supporters were to blame.

...

"Our Web site consultant assured us in the strongest terms possible that we had been attacked," former Lieberman campaign spokesman Dan Gerstein said in December 2006.

According to the FBI memo, the site crashed because Lieberman officials continually exceeded a configured limit of 100 e-mails per hour the night before the primary.

"The system administrator misinterpreted the root cause," the memo stated. "The system administrator finally declared the server was being attacked and the Lieberman campaign accused the Ned Lamont campaign. The news reported this on Aug. 8, 2006, causing additional Web traffic to visit the site.

"The additional Web traffic then overwhelmed the Web server. . . . Web traffic pattern analysis reports and Web logging that was available did not demonstrate traffic that was indicative of a denial of service attack."

That's right, Holy Joe! He blamed others for his own campaign mistakes, slandered Ned Lamont, and the FBI got in the tank for him!

Then fought tooth and nail to prevent it getting out in court!

Source: The Politico
The Stamford Advocate

Scientific

2008-04-03T19:12:00.002-04:00

When Will I Get My Death Ray?

Epileptic Attack
So an attack on Epilepsy patients is being pinned on Anonymous members.

Or people posing as them.

Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users.

The nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation, which runs the forum, briefly closed the site Sunday to purge the offending messages and to boost security.

"We are seeing people affected," says Ken Lowenberg, senior director of web and print publishing at the Epilepsy Foundation. "It's fortunately only a handful. It's possible that people are just not reporting yet -- people affected by it may not be coming back to the forum so fast."

The incident, possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on the victims, began Saturday, March 22, when attackers used a script to post hundreds of messages embedded with flashing animated gifs.

The attackers turned to a more effective tactic on Sunday, injecting JavaScript into some posts that redirected users' browsers to a page with a more complex image designed to trigger seizures in both photosensitive and pattern-sensitive epileptics.

RyAnne Fultz, a 33-year-old woman who suffers from pattern-sensitive epilepsy, says she clicked on a forum post with a legitimate-sounding title on Sunday. Her browser window resized to fill her screen, which was then taken over by a pattern of squares rapidly flashing in different colors.

Fultz says she "locked up."

"I don't fall over and convulse, but it hurts," says Fultz, an IT worker in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. "I was on the phone when it happened, and I couldn't move and couldn't speak."

After about 10 seconds, Fultz's 11-year-old son came over and drew her gaze away from the computer, then killed the browser process, she says.

"Everyone who logged on, it affected to some extent, whether by causing headaches or seizures," says Browen Mead, a 24-year-old epilepsy patient in Maine who says she suffered a daylong migraine after examining several of the offending posts. She'd lingered too long on the pages trying to determine who was responsible.

Circumstantial evidence suggests the attack was the work of members of Anonymous, an informal collective of griefers best known for their recent war on the Church of Scientology. The first flurry of posts on the epilepsy forum referenced the site EBaumsWorld, which is much hated by Anonymous. And forum members claim they found a message board thread -- since deleted -- planning the attack at 7chan.org, a group stronghold.

When this Anonymous group started I said there'd be trouble with group discipline. How can you possibly keep people on topic, or avoid copycat groups posing as you, if you have no organizational structure? It's madness! Did they think the Scientologists wouldn't just pose as Anon people?

I don't know if this is the work of actual Anonymous people, posers, or people looking to slander them. It hardly matters at this point. When they set up their little internet conglom, they doomed themselves to precisely this kind of irrelevance, one way or another.

Source: Wired

Truly Epic Fail
Bush's moonbase to Mars plans continue to crash on the hard rocks of reality.

Cosmic rays are so dangerous and so poorly understood that people are unlikely to get to Mars or even back to the moon until better ways are found to protect astronauts, experts said on Monday.

And NASA is not properly funding the right experiments to find out how, the National Research Council committee said.

"One of the big issues is they have really cut funding for biology issues," retired space shuttle astronaut James van Hoften, who chaired the committee, said in a telephone interview.

"It is tough on them when they don't have any new money coming in. They are using old data," he added -- including research done on survivors of the nuclear bombings of Japan during World War Two.

"Given today's knowledge and today's understanding of radiation protection, to put someone out in that type of environment would violate the current requirements that NASA has."

The committee of experts agreed that NASA'S existing radiation safety standards can protect astronauts and they urged the U.S. space agency to keep them in place.

The Earth's bulk, atmosphere and magnetic field protect life from the solar radiation and the cosmic rays that travel through space. Astronauts have just a thin layer of shielding.

Van Hoften knows from personal experience.

"My introduction to space radiation came first-hand as a crew member aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger in April 1984. 'What the heck was that?' I blurted out after seeing what looked like a white laser passing quickly through my eyes," van Hoften wrote in the introduction to the report.

"'Oh, that's just cosmic rays,' said Pinky Nelson, my spacewalking partner and space physicist. The thought of extremely high-energy particles originating from a distant cosmic event passing easily through the space shuttle and subsequently through my head made me think that this cannot be all that healthy. The truth of the matter is that it is not."

NOWHERE TO HIDE

The cosmic rays include galactic cosmic radiation or GCR and solar particles.

"You can put on very thick walls and they just won't protect you from that," van Hoften said. "The younger you are the worse it is," he added, because as with many types of radiation, it can take years for the damage to cause disease.

"It might be OK if you just send a bunch of old guys like me," he laughed.

Any mission to Mars using current technology would take three years, van Hoften said. That long in space would subject astronauts to too much radiation .

"It hasn't really gotten the airing that it needs. In the committee we stewed over this for a long time before we said anything," he added.

There is simply no way to shield people with current technology for a trip as long as the one to Mars. They would all end up dead. It's a suicide mission.

The moon of course you can do, because it's a couple days away. It's still a big risk; the wrong solar flare and everyone dies.

But if the only point of going back to the moon is to build a base (deep underground on the mooon to block radiation since the moon has no magnetic field) that will take you to Mars, and you can't go to Mars... what was the point again?

Source: ABC News

Opaque
A new technique has been created to scan insects trapped in opaque amber and create three dimensional scans, then models, of the creatures.

It is like a magic trick - at first there is nothing and then it appears: a tiny insect unseen by any eye for 100 million years.

We are with Paul Tafforeau who is scrolling through images on his computer.

His pictures have been produced by a colossal X-ray machine that can illuminate the insides of small lumps of clouded amber (fossil tree resin).

As he plays with the settings, what starts out as grey nothingness suddenly becomes the unmistakable outline of a "wee beastie".

Who knows? This little creature could once have buzzed a dinosaur. It's certainly the right age.

Tafforeau is a palaeontologist. But whilst others of his profession will be in the dirt with a rock hammer and trowel, you'll find him at the end of one of the most remarkable "cameras" in the world.

The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, produces an intense, high-energy light that can pierce just about any material, revealing its inner structure.

...

"Micro-tomography is based on radiography but instead of a single picture, we are taking pictures during rotation of the sample," explains Dr Tafforeau.

"For a complete rotation, we will take more than 1,000 radiographs - and from all these radiographs, we can reconstruct virtual slices; and after using a 3D processing tool, we 'extract' the specimen from the amber."

...

But here's the really neat part. All that electronic information can be fed to a 3D plastic printer to make a physical model. A bug that in reality is less than a millimetre long and hidden inside a resin block then becomes a 30cm-long facsimile you can hold in your hand.

Instant prehistoric toys!

That is amazingly neat. I love 3D printers. Someday I shall own one, oh yes.

Source: BBC News

Smoke Gene
More promising genomic research.

Three independent studies released Wednesday have identified a tiny variation in the human genome that make some people more vulnerable to lung cancer than others.

While they all finger the same culprit, however, the studies disagree on whether the genetic glitch -- shared by 50 percent of the population -- increases the risk of cancer by itself, or only in people who smoke.

Basically all three studies agree this gene variant makes you much more likely to die of lung cancer, but they disagree as to why.

One suggests that it makes smokers heavier smokers; one suggests that it makes smokers more susceptible to cancer; one suggests that anyone with the disease is more likely to get lung cancer.

Regardless, not a good gene to have.

Source: Raw Story

Eww
Kind of gross.

Fifty rivers in the Philippines have been destroyed because people are using them to dump their rubbish, leaving some ecologically dead, an official said Wednesday.

Of the country's 421 major rivers and 20 large river basins, 50 are "highly degraded because of man's abuse and neglect," Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Joselito Atienza said in a statement.

"History tells us that rivers have played an important role in the country's economic growth. Yet, we have disregarded this and continue to dirty our rivers and lakes by turning them into giant septic tanks and trash bins," he added.

One of the ecologically dead rivers is the Pasig which bisects Manila. The government has been relocating thousands of squatters from its banks, but those who remain "continue to throw their domestic waste into the river," he said.

Atienza said 53 percent of the pollution in Philippine rivers is due to domestic waste.

Oh well, not like anyone needed those rivers.

Geez. I'm not trying to pick on the developing world here, but.. ewww.

Source: Raw Story

Sun-Nami
NASA has captured video of a solar tsunami, which is much like the ones on Earth only far, far more exciting.

In a solar tsunami, a huge explosion near the Sun, such as a coronal mass ejection or flare, causes a pressure pulse to propagate outwards in a circular pattern.

Last year's solar tsunami, which took place on 19 May 2007, lasted for about 35 minutes, reaching peak speeds about 20 minutes after the initial blast.

Co-author David Long, from Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Ireland, commented: "The energy released in these explosions is phenomenal; about two billion times the annual world energy consumption in just a fraction of a second.

...

Stereo's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUVI) instruments monitor the Sun at four wavelengths, which allowed astronomers to see how the wave moved through the different layers of the solar atmosphere.

"We were able to show for the first time that this wave actually propagates almost all the way from the surface of the Sun to high up in the Sun's atmosphere," said Dr Gallagher.

The researchers even saw the pressure wave bouncing off irregular regions of the Sun’s atmosphere, generating reflections or diffraction patterns - exactly as tsunamis have been observed to do on Earth when they crash against land.

Nice special effects.

Source: BBC News

Tiny?
The smallest black hole known has been found.

NASA scientists have identified the smallest, lightest black hole yet found.

The new lightweight record-holder weighs in at about 3.8 times the mass of our sun and is only 15 miles (24 kilometers) in diameter.

"This black hole is really pushing the limits," said study team leader Nikolai Shaposhnikov of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "For many years astronomers have wanted to know the smallest possible size of a black hole, and this little guy is a big step toward answering that question."

It's almost four times the mass of our sun, but for a Black Hole, it's tiny.

This is why that idiot who wants to block the Large Hadron Collider being turned on is so silly. Black holes have to be utterly huge to survive more than an exceedingly brief time. This is the smallest one ever found in nature. A black hole the size of an atom would be gone almost instantaneously. It's nothing to worry about.

Source: Space.com

Vidiots
I don't know what's with videogame bashing but it really is tiresome.

Kotaku has, first, some excerpts of an angry crank writing in the Times Online.

I hate video games, on or offline. I hate the way they suck real people into fake worlds and hold on to them for decades at a time. I hate being made to feel hateful for saying so, and I hate being told to immerse myself in them before passing judgment, because it feels like being told to immerse myself in smack and teenage pregnancy before passing judgment on them.

First of all, smack and teenage pregnancy?

Smack I can almost see, but how is 'teenage pregnancy' a recreational activity?

Secondly, I seem to recall some crank who thought that it was best to judge activities where possible from experience. I wonder who that was...

In the first two chapters, Mill aims to precisely define what utilitarianism claims — in terms of the general moral principles that it uses to judge concrete actions, and in terms of the sort of evidence that is supposed to be given for those principles. In so doing, he hopes to do away with some common misunderstandings of utilitarianism, as well as defend it against philosophical criticisms, most notably Kant. In the first chapter, Mill distinguishes two broad schools of ethical theory: those whose principles are defended by appeals to intuition and those whose principles are defended by appeals to experience; and he identifies utilitarianism as one of the empirical theories of ethics. In the second chapter, he then formulates a single ethical principle, from which he says all utilitarian ethical principles are derived:

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.

Most importantly, it is not the agent’s own greatest happiness that matters, “but the greatest amount of happiness altogether.” (ch2) Utilitarianism therefore can only attain its goal of greater happiness by cultivating the nobleness of individuals so that all can benefit from the honor of others. In fact, notes Mill, Utilitarianism is actually a "standard of morality" which uses happiness of the greater number of people as its ultimate goal.

Knowledge and education are fundamental to Mill's concept of the Greater Happiness, and in his famous words, “it is better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied,” (260) Mill touts the importance of being well brought up and knowledgeably curious about the world, and understanding higher pleasures such as art and music, than to be uneducated and complacent. One need not be personally satisfied with his or her life to be able to contribute to the "total sum happiness" of a society.

Oh, right. It was John Stuart Mill.

Silly me. Well, me and all of modern society, being based on Utilitarianism and all.

Seriously though, videogames are a medium, not a message. There are trash books, trash paintings, and Cthulhu knows, bad tv shows. There are also great books, paintings, tv, etc. Pushing aside an entire form of expression as broad as videogames showcases only one's own ignorance.

I mean, seriously. You have everything from Grand Theft Auto III (each of which is an interesting take on gangster culture and movies, from Goodfellas to the Sopranos to Training Day) to Spore and Second Life, which are about as cerebral and non-violent as a seminar on Expressionist Painting.

Only a lot more fun. Well, Spore probably is. Second Life... feh.

Then we have Barack Obama, who seems to buy into the idea that tv and videogames and, well, indoor activities are bad for you.

In a race for the Democratic nomination, Obama hasn't made any passionate speeches about video games with the fervor he has addressed health care, the war in Iraq or Hillary Clinton, but he has continued making jabs at games with little concern. In a recent speech at Wilkes Hall in Pennsylvania, he urged the public, "...turn off the television, turn off the video games..." in a similar rhetoric to just last February when he urged the public, "...parent better, and turn off the television set, and put the video games away, and instill a sense of excellence in our children..."

How about people teach their kids to think for themselves and find their own entertainment?

Honestly. This from a guy who hung out with slumlords. Maybe he'd have been better off staying inside and playing a round of Street Fighter.

Source: Kotaku (crank)
Kotaku (obama)
Wikipedia (Mill's Utilitarianism)

America, Just Like In the Songs

2008-04-03T17:43:00.003-04:00

America, America, etc.

Won't Stand on Ceremony
So Bush threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the first game of the season, at the first game EVER for the new, all-baseball stadium in DC.

He got a very, very chilly reception to say the least.

Source: Think Progress

Sign Up
So Firedoglake has filed an FEC complaint against St. John McCain for violating campaign finance regulations, ironically his own, from McCain-Feingold.

Maverick is breaking a law you wrote, I suppose.

Anyway, after Jane Hamsher filed the initial complaint, they asked for cosigners. I signed, along with 32,000 other people, and they delivered the signatures to the FEC.

They're up to 34 and change now. Not that the FEC will do anything, but it's nice to let them know that lots of people are watching.

Source: Youtube/Firedoglake Channel

Can't Shoot Straight
A nice summary of Mike McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, who is a total tool.

In his first months as DNI, McConnell did plenty to undermine that rep. He told Congress that three German terrorism suspects had been arrested due to intercepts made possible by the then-new Protect America Act when in fact they were obtained under the old FISA law. Soon after, McConnell offered a especially misleading account to Congress of a supposed FISA Court ruling that had delayed the U.S. from spying on the kidnappers of U.S. troops in Iraq. And throughout congressional debate on a surveillance law he claimed that the debate itself endangered American lives.

Then earlier this year, he suggested that a questioner at a public event at Johns Hopkins was "disappointed" that the U.S. hadn't suffered additional terrorist attacks. And now McConnell has really let lose, framing the Senate debate on the surveillance bill as being between those who think "we shouldn't have an Intelligence Community" and those who do. That has prompted a letter from Sen. Russ Feingold demanding an apology for those false characterizations of the debate.

Yes, that FISA law, which only governs domestic spying, really is an impediment to wiretaping Iraqis in Iraq... err, wait a second...

Plus of course, even if they were making calls into the US, you can tap and apply for warrants up to 3 days later.

Which they weren't. Because there's no reason to, they're not that stupid, Iraq has a few functional hours of power a day and I doubt their phones work all that well... sigh.

Source: Talking Points Memo

Go Keith
So Wal-Mart has dropped their attempt to squeeze a brain-damaged woman for the money keeping her in care and off the street. Finally.

Wal-Mart is dropping an effort to collect over $400,000 in health care reimbursement from a former employee who is confined to a southeast Missouri nursing home since she suffered brain damage in a traffic accident.

The world's largest retailer said Tuesday in a letter to the family of Deborah Shank it will not seek to collect money the Shanks won in an injury lawsuit against a trucking company for the accident.

Wal-Mart's top executive for human resources, Pat Curran, wrote that Shank's extraordinary situation had made the company re-examine its stance.

Deborah's husband Jim Shank welcomed the news. Family lawyer Maurice Graham of St. Louis said Wal-Mart deserves credit for doing the right thing.

"It's a good day for the Shank family," Jim Shank said in a statement.

Wal-Mart has been roundly criticized in newspaper editorials, on cable news shows and by its union foes for its claim to the funds, which it made in a lawsuit upheld by a federal appeals court.

Insurance experts say it is increasingly common for health plans to seek reimbursement for the medical expenses they paid for someone's treatment if the person also collects damages in an injury suit.

The practice, called "subrogation," has increased since a 2006 Supreme Court ruling that eased it.

Thanks a lot Supreme Court!

Pfft. I'm sick of people saying that politics doesn't affect them. The next Supreme Court justice will determine whether we get more of this nonsense. Keep that in mind.

Source: Raw Story

Clinton SMASH
Eep. I hope nobody angers him on his next stop in B-town.

The Bill Clinton who met privately with California's superdelegates at last weekend's state convention was a far cry from the congenial former president who afterward publicly urged fellow Democrats to "chill out" over the race between his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Barack Obama.

In fact, before his speech Clinton had one of his famous meltdowns Sunday, blasting away at former presidential contender Bill Richardson for having endorsed Obama, the media and the entire nomination process.

"It was one of the worst political meetings I have ever attended," one superdelegate said.

According to those at the meeting, Clinton - who flew in from Chicago with bags under his eyes - was classic old Bill at first, charming and making small talk with the 15 or so delegates who gathered in a room behind the convention stage.

But as the group moved together for the perfunctory photo, Rachel Binah, a former Richardson delegate who now supports Hillary Clinton, told Bill how "sorry" she was to have heard former Clinton campaign manager James Carville call Richardson a "Judas" for backing Obama.

It was as if someone pulled the pin from a grenade.

"Five times to my face (Richardson) said that he would never do that," a red-faced, finger-pointing Clinton erupted.

The former president then went on a tirade that ran from the media's unfair treatment of Hillary to questions about the fairness of the votes in state caucuses that voted for Obama. It ended with him asking delegates to imagine what the reaction would be if Obama was trailing by just 1 percent and people were telling him to drop out.

"It was very, very intense," said one attendee. "Not at all like the Bill of earlier campaigns."

When he finally wound down, Bill was asked what message he wanted the delegates to take away from the meeting.

At that point, a much calmer Clinton outlined his message of party unity.

"It was kind of strange later when he took the stage and told everyone to 'chill out,' " one delegate told us.

"We couldn't help but think he was also talking to himself."

When delegate Binah - still stunned from her encounter with Clinton - got home to Little River (Mendocino County) later in the day - there was a phone message waiting for her from State Party Chairman Art Torres, telling her the former president wanted him to apologize to her on his behalf for what happened.

Some people just can't accept defeat with any sort of grace.

Bill, in a winner take all system, a 1% pluarlity is .9999999999999% more than you need to be the winner. You'd think this would have come up at some point in your long political career.

Source: SFGate.com

Spouses
The Pentagon, surprise surprise, is not exactly a bastion of tolerance.

The Pentagon at first blocked Rep. Tammy Baldwin's domestic partner from traveling on a military plane with a congressional delegation on a trip to Europe but gave in after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi intervened.

The Pentagon said it was merely following House rules, which do not define domestic partners as spouses. Pelosi's office countered that the Pentagon has its own rules about who can go on its planes.

Both sides agree that Defense Secretary Robert Gates reversed the decision to keep Baldwin's partner, Lauren Azar, off the plane after getting contacted by Pelosi, D-Calif.

"It's a matter of fairness that spouses should be allowed to go, and she is Ms. Baldwin's spouse," said Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly. He said that Baldwin had raised the exclusion with a colleague, who mentioned it to Pelosi. The lawmakers visited France, the Czech Republic and Poland last month.

Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat and openly gay House member, declined to talk about the incident, which was first reported by the political newspaper Politico. Azar, a Madison energy law attorney who serves on the Wisconsin Public Service Commission, did not return a call seeking comment Tuesday.

The Pentagon still has in place its "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which bars gays from serving openly in the military. But that had nothing to do with this case, said Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell.

"This is strictly about following our statutory guidelines and the House rules," he said.

Morrell said that Pelosi asked Gates to honor her decision to waive House rules to allow Azar to travel and that Gates asked her to put that request in writing.

"She did so, and he — in this one case only — agreed to it," Morrell said. "This is not a precedent by any means. This does not open the doors for life partners to travel on congressional delegations." But Gates has agreed to review future requests on a case-by-case basis, Morrell said.

Daly said that both the Pentagon and Pelosi had to issue waivers.

But gay people don't need the same rights as straights!

Personally I don't think being married should get you a free plane ride any more than living together, or just being good friends. You should get one free jump seat a piece. Anything else is religious/cultural discrimination.

Source: Page One Q

Old Man McCain
Man, could this geezer get any more decrepit?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Republican presidential candidate John McCain believes many Americans are cynical about their country, and their idea of liberty is "the right to choose among competing brands of designer coffee."

What these people need, he will argue on Wednesday, is a good dose of public service.

That is one of the messages McCain will give on Wednesday on a visit to his university, the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where he admittedly bucked authority and slacked off on his studies to the point that he graduated fifth from the bottom of his class.

McCain is on a nostalgic tour of places important to developing his character as he fights for media coverage dominated by the extended Democratic battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Old Man McCain is on a NOSTALGIA tour, where he gives speeches about how these whipper snappers today aren't like kids used to be!

Lord.

He comes close to calling some Americans spoiled, saying they are cynical because "the ease which wealth and opportunity have given their lives led them to the mistaken conclusion that America, and the liberties its system of government is intended to protect, just aren't important to the quality of their lives."

Skepticism is healthy, he will say, "But when healthy skepticism sours into corrosive cynicism our expectations of our government become reduced to the delivery of services. And to some people the expectations of liberty are reduced to the right to choose among competing brands of designer coffee."

Oh yeah. They're cynical because everything is JUST SO GREAT.

We're in a full blown depression, our infrastructure is in ruins, our bridges are falling down, factories are closing like bad broadway shows and McCain's solution is to mock people who aren't just GUSHING.

Keep it up, geezer. Keep it up.

We'll stay off your lawn.

Source: Raw Story

Show Us Your Papers!
The Pentagon is going to defund colleges that honor student requests not to have their personal details handed to military recruiters.

Scum.

The Defense Department has announced a new get-tough policy with colleges and universities that interfere with the work of military recruiters and Reserve Officer Training Corps programs.

Under rules that will take effect April 28, defense officials said they want the exact same access to student directories that is provided to all other prospective employers.

Students can opt out of having their information turned over to the military only if they opt out of having their information provided to all other recruiters, but schools cannot have policies that exclude only the military, defense officials said in a March 28 notice of the new policy in the Federal Register.

The Defense Department “will honor only those student ‘opt-outs’ from the disclosure of directory information that are even-handedly applied to all prospective employers seeking information for recruiting purposes,” the notice says.

Directories are an important recruiting tool because they include the names, birthdates, phone numbers and academic pursuits of college students that can be used to identify people with knowledge and interests that are particularly useful to the military.

So if you want to get any job at all in America now, post-college, you need to take all the harassing phone calls the Army wants to make.

What's next? Mandatory Army exit interviews?

Are we going to start the draft again, or what? Honestly, stop sissying around and do it if you're going to. You'll be surprised at the response. The day after you people try it, there won't be a recruiting center left standing.

Which is of course why they do this backdoor draft to their own people and swindle the poor kids out of their lives.

Federal funding can be cut off if colleges and universities do not give recruiters and ROTC programs campus access. While student financial assistance is not at risk, other federal aid, especially research funding, can disappear if a school does not cooperate.

The Pentagon can declare colleges or universities anti-ROTC if they prohibit or prevent a Senior ROTC program from being established, maintained or efficiently operated.

The new policy is, in part, the result of a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the federal government’s ability to use funding as a means of forcing equal access for military recruiters and ROTC units on campuses.

Thanks again, Supreme Court!

Also, nice how the school can be penalized if THE ARMY PEOPLE don't 'efficiently run' an operation. Also nice that in a country getting its butt kicked by the EU in science and tech, our first response is to SLASH OUR RESEARCH BUDGETS.

Source: The Army Times

Enough Already!
Prostitutes! Everywhere!

WASHINGTON -- Speaking for the first time about her husband's acknowledgment that he paid for sex with an alleged prostitute, U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow told the Free Press this afternoon she's going through a "very difficult and personal" time and will continue to work through it with her family.

The senator from Lansing did not want to talk about whether she and her husband are still together or how she learned of his being stopped by Troy police in February. According to a police report obtained this morning by the Free Press, Tom Athans -- a liberal radio talk-show executive -- told Troy detectives he paid a prostitute he contacted via the Internet $150 for sex at a Residence Inn in the metro Detroit suburb.

What is WRONG with these people? They've got money! If you want a prostitute, by all means, go where it's legal!

This isn't hard folks. People do it all the time for gambling vacations. Just get a ticket to Vegas, Amsterdam, what have you, take a trip, get yourself a legal, regulated prostitute. If you go to Vegas, take in a show too! Amsterdam, you can do shrooms or smoke weed all day and nobody will look twice.

Yeesh.

Source: Detroit Free Press

Not Good Enough
Nice try though, Barack.

Chances for an Al Gore presidency may be all-but-nonexistent at this point in the campaign, but Barack Obama said Wednesday the former vice president might just have a spot in his administration, perhaps even cabinet-level.

A woman at a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania asked whether Obama, if elected, would tap Gore for such a position to address global warming issues.

"I would," Obama said. "Not only will I, but I will make a commitment that Al Gore will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this problem."

Obama said Gore is "somebody I talk to on a regular basis. I'm already consulting with him in terms of these issues, but climate change is real."

I'm not sure what the cabinet position would be for climate change. We don't have any agency devoted to such matters.

State is involved with treaties, but I'd put a Climate Change guy in at Energy. We're only going to get out of this long-term with new energy sources and technology, and by spending a lot of money on research.

Source: Raw Story

McCain the Anti-Semite
St. John McCain sure has some less than saintly friends.

It was the last recorded act of official anti-Semitism by the United States government. Boy, was it ever recorded! On Sept. 24, the presidential recordings program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs released transcripts of Nixon White House tapes concerning the unauthorized publication in the New York Times and the Washington Post of the Pentagon Papers. Some of these conversations were previously transcribed by the nonprofit National Security Archive, but many were not. Among the previously untranscribed conversations is President Nixon's historic inquiry into a topic unrelated to Daniel Ellsberg's leak: How many Jews were employed at the Bureau of Labor Statistics?

Loyal readers of this column are aware of my fascination with this repulsive episode. The Miller Center's new transcriptions are accompanied by audio, allowing us not merely to remember this squalid transaction but to relive it. Kenneth J. Hughes, the Miller Center's Nixon tapes editor, has kindly furnished Slate with the memo traffic concerning the Jew count, including a never-before-published memo by White House personnel director Fred Malek confirming the planned transfer of three Jews to less-visible jobs and the effective demotion of a BLS deputy with a Jewish-sounding surname. Malek, today a very wealthy investor, remains active in Republican politics; this past April, he was named national finance co-chair of John McCain's presidential campaign. Last year, Malek was edged out by an octogenarian real-estate tycoon to become owner of the Washington Nationals baseball team, despite strong local support. I have my suspicions the Jew-counting episode was a factor in baseball Commissioner Bud Selig's choice, though that isn't the official story.

That's right! McCain's finance bigwig helped Nixon's paranoid attempt to purge the government of Jews!

Boy I'm eager to see a McCain presidency.

Two days later, on July 26, Haldeman sends a memo to Malek. "What's the status of your analysis of the BLS; specifically of the 21 key people?" Haldeman writes. "What is their demographic breakdown?"

Malek answers in a memo the following day. Out of 50 names on the organization chart, Malek has run down the party affiliations of 35. Twenty-five are Democrats, one is a Republican, and nine are either independents, not registered, or of unknown party affiliation. "In addition," Malek writes (someone—presumably either Haldeman or Nixon himself—has underlined this sentence), "13 out of the 35 fit the other demographic criterion that was discussed." Scribbled beneath this (I'm guessing by Haldeman) are the words, "Most of these are at the top." (Malek's method of identifying who was Jewish and who wasn't was to scrutinize surnames, rendering his estimate as unreliable as it was abhorrent.)

So he's not only an anti-semite, he's an idiot.

I'm very much amused by the fact that Jews are supposed to be this evil, supersecret, super devious cabal, but that at the same time they're supposed to be too dumb to change their last names.

Wow. Cognitive dissonance.

Source: Slate

Chemical Cheney
So Cheney is involved in more evil than previously known. Big surprise.

Vice President Dick Cheney opposed the signing ratification of a treaty banning the use chemical weapons, a recently unearthed letter shows.

183 countries pledged never to "develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile or retain chemical weapons, or transfer, directly or indirectly, chemical weapons to anyone" under the Chemical Weapons Convention, put into effect in 1997.

But in a letter dated April 8, 1997, then Halliburton-CEO Cheney told Sen. Jesse Helms, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that it would be a mistake for America to join the Convention. "Those nations most likely to comply with the Chemical Weapons Convention are not likely to ever constitute a military threat to the United States. The governments we should be concerned about are likely to cheat on the CWC, even if they do participate," reads the letter, published by the Federation of American Scientists.

The CWC was ratified by the Senate that same month. And since then, Albania, Libya, Russia, the United States, and India have declared over 71,000 metric tons of chemical weapon stockpiles, and destroyed about a third of them. Under the terms of the agreement, the United States and Russia are supposed to eliminate the rest of their supplies of chemical weapons by 2012. But that looks unlikely -- the U.S. government figures it will get the job done by 2017.

Later this month, the 183 countries that have signed onto the CWC will meet in the Hague, to discuss how the Conference can be adapted for the future. An Iranian diplomat told Arms Control Today that Iran would like this so-called "review conference" to describe any violation of the 2012 deadline “as a clear case of serious noncompliance,” which could eventually lead to punitive measures.

Ahh, Iran. I'd say that they're right and we're dragging our feet, but I also know just how hard it is to get rid of the stuff the US made in the cold war.

*shrug* If we wanted to get it done we would. I bet the pace of destruction slowed way down when Darth Cheney took over, at any rate.

Source: Wired (Danger Room)

Basra
So, why did Maliki attack Basra and almost bring about the destruction of his own government?

Well, it turns out, he hates democracy almost as much as his patron Bush.

The campaign was a predictable fiasco, another in a long line of strategic failures for the sickly and divided Iraqi government, which survives largely because it is propped up by the United States. So why did al-Maliki do it? With no obvious immediate crisis in Basra that called for such desperate measures, what could have motivated the decision to attack?

Three main motivations present themselves: control of petroleum smuggling, staying in power (including keeping U.S. troops around to ensure it), and the achievement of a Shiite super-province in the south. A southern super-province would spell a soft partition of the country, benefiting Shiites in the long term while cutting Sunnis out of substantial oil revenues, both licit and illicit. But all of the motivations have to do with something President Bush established as a benchmark in January 2007: upcoming provincial elections.

The Sadr Movement leaders themselves are convinced that the recent setting of a date for provincial elections, on Oct. 1, 2008, and al-Maliki's desire to improve the government's position in advance of the elections, precipitated the prime minister's attack. It is widely thought that the Sadrists might sweep to power in the provinces in free and fair elections, since the electorate is deeply dissatisfied with the performance of the major incumbent party in the southern provinces, the Islamic Supreme Council of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.

Provincial elections could radically change the political landscape in Iraq. Both the Sunni Arabs and the Sadr Movement sat out the last round, in late January 2005. Thus, governments in the Sunni Arab areas are unrepresentative and in one case a Sunni-majority province, Diyala, is actually ruled by the Shiite Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), which Sunnis tend to see as a puppet of Iran.

Likewise in the Shiite south, the ISCI, led by Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, is largely in power, even though probably a majority of the population favors Sadr. To have a minority in power and the majority feeling disenfranchised is especially dangerous in a violent society such as Iraq. The disjuncture has contributed to endemic fighting in the capital of Qadisiya Province, Diwaniya, for instance, between Sadr's Mahdi army and the paramilitary of the Islamic Supreme Council, or Badr Corps. In many provinces, ISCI has infiltrated members of its Badr paramilitary into the police and security forces, thus giving them the presumption of legitimacy and allowing the branding of the Mahdi army as violent militiamen with no popular mandate, won at the polls.

That the week's fighting was intended to bolster pro-government forces in preparation for the October provincial elections is at least plausible. During the fighting, the Iraqi army was allied with the Badr Corps paramilitary of the ISCI, which was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. ISCI, the leading Shiite political party in parliament, is now al-Maliki's main backer in the government, along with his own smaller Da'wa (Islamic Call) Party. And U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner told a news conference on Wednesday that the Iraqi army's military operation, which U.S. forces aided, was aimed at improving "security" in the city ahead of provincial elections.

So there you have it. Our Iranian trained allies are trying to kill off all their rivals ahead of an election they cannot hope to win.

Thanks, El Presidente!

Source: Salon.com

Horrorhound Report March 2k8

2008-04-02T17:37:00.005-04:00

Horrorhound

So we went to the Horrorhound Weekend last Saturday, and I have to say, it was a fun, if somewhat underwhelming experience.

I've been to conventions before, so I know not to expect too much in some areas, but I've also been to The Dark Carnival, which in its first year was so awesome as to be mind-blowing. I think it's really a question of emphasis. DC is a film-festival, with two solid days of things to see, panels to attend, shows, etc. It's focused squarely on the enterainment.

More regular conventions like Horrorhound are, on the other hand, focused on merchandising. Autographs, photos, stuff to buy, and tons and tons of bootlegs.

Seriously. I don't think I saw one legitimate video sale booth, but I saw a buttload of bootleg cartoons and porn.

Well, the porn might not have been bootlegs.

Horrorhound had very little in the way of activities compared to DC. A few movies, a panel or two, and that's it (except for the costume contest, more on that below), over 3 days. The merchandise room was all right, for killing about an hour and spending a hundred bucks. Don't get me wrong; we picked up some cool stuff there.

We hit the Dark Carnival booth of course, and got some t-shirts, and a copy of Stupid Teenagers Must Die, which the roommate loved from the festival itself.

We also got some DVDs autographed by Tom Savini, which was awesome. I know it makes me a pagan, but I really love the 90s remake of Night of the Living Dead. It was one of the first zombie movies I ever saw, on late night tv, and it holds a special place in my heart. It's unrelentingly grim and close and confining, and doesn't go overboard on splash or effects, but keeps everything scary with a no-nonsense directorial approach, facilitated by Savini's brilliant effects, which hold up even today far better than the CG head-splodey you get in so many zombie films.

Savini himself is wonderfully laid back and friendly in person. I was honestly a bit shy around him. Most celebrities I don't feel that awed by, but something about bothering Savini for autographs, even on DVDs we purchased there, made me feel embarassed. He was incredibly nice about the whole thing, and had a policy that if you bought anything from him to sign, he'd sign your other stuff too. Thus we bought 2 dvds and he signed our home copy of Dawn of the Dead for free, which was great. Now I have Night and Dawn signed, and my brother in law Ted got Dawn to take home too.

Maybe I just feel more like he's an artist than most famous people. He created literal, physical art, after all; human sculptures designed to terrify. They work, too, and he is pretty much the undisputed king of his craft. He's the best Zombie Sculptor in the world. That's pretty impressive.

Finally, we picked up some nifty pub glasses that reference Shaun of the Dead rather shamelessly.

I was also able to score an autographed photo of Sammy Terry for my sister, who is a big fan. Terry takes the time to talk with each person, and they're willing to sign things for as little as a dollar, which is really something. The man clearly cares about the fans, coming out at his age to do conventions like this.

So you can definitely find some fun at a place like Horrohound...

But to entertain yourself at a convention like this, you need a lot of money.

A lot.

Dark Carnival was 35 bucks, I think, for 3 days of free screenings, a drive-in performance, and two solid days of the Festival. Horrorhound will cost you the same for 2 and a half days of wandering around in a room full of stuff to buy. There really is no comparison.

Of course, it's still a ton better than the Star Wars Celebration I went to, where there were several times too many people for the event and you couldn't get in to see anything at all. Plus it cost 70 bucks for 2 days.

I don't mean to bash Horrorhound too much though; there was definitely fun to be had. For example, there was a costume contest that the roommate and I crashed at the last minute in our Giant Leech costumes...

We tied for 1st Place in the 'Best Random Costume' contest, which was awesome.

Here are the prizes we got, which are pretty nifty. Except for Alien vs. Predator, of course.

Well, that about wraps it up for Horrorhound. I think we'll go again in August, but probably just for Saturday again. We can really hit all the stuff we want to hit in a day or so, and it helps to staunch the wallet bleed. Plus I'd really like to enter another costume contest; I have an idea for the next one that would be really special.

Random News

2008-04-02T07:41:00.002-04:00

Oddities

Crossover
So there was recently a crossover between Sally Forth and Pearls Before Swine, where Ted Forth sneaks away from his wife at a hotel to find a prostitute.

Apparently this was an out of the blue idea from the PBS guy and the Sally Forth guy was so amused he tied his comic into what was otherwise solely a gag strip making fun of it.

Nifty.

Sources: Francesco Explains It All
The Comics Curmudgeon

Art Show
A series of photos from an art show featuring reimagined Saturday Morning cartoon characters. I liked this Blip from Space Ghost a lot, but there are some awesome Herculoids in there too.

Source: Flickr

Annoy the Cops
Not the smartest game, but they do have it coming.

WAUSAU, Wis. (AP) -- Cars lining the street. A house full of young people. A keg and drinking games inside. Police thought they had an underage boozing party on their hands.

But though they made dozens of teens take breath tests, none tested positive for alcohol. That's because the keg contained root beer.

The party was held by a high school student who wanted to show that teens don't always drink alcohol at their parties. It has gained fame on YouTube.com.

Dustin Zebro, 18, said he staged the party after friends at D.C. Everest High School got suspended from sports because of pictures showing them drinking from red cups.

The root-beer kegger was "to kind of make fun of the school," he said. "They assumed there was beer in the cups. We just wanted to have some root beer in red cups and just make it look like a party, but there actually wasn't any alcohol."

Zebro purchased a quarter-barrel of 1919 Classic American Draft Root Beer, and by 10 p.m. Saturday, the scene outside his rural Wausau home had all the makings of a teen drinking party - cars, noise and kids.

Kronenwetter Police Chief Daniel Joling said an officer was dispatched to the home March 1 on a complaint of cars blocking the road.

Juveniles began coming out of the house after the officer used his squad car's loudspeaker to warn that cars would soon be towed, Officer Jason Rasmussen wrote in his report.

Nearly 90 breath tests were done, and officers even searched locked rooms for hiding teens.

"It was a tremendous waste of time and manpower, but we still had a job to do, and our officers did it," Joling said. "If one kid had come there, even hadn't drank there, but had come there and had been drinking and had left and crashed and burned, then what would the sentiment be? Why didn't the police check everybody out?"

Dangerous, and I don't approve of the noisy party part, but still. Cops do have it coming. Ever since the Fourth Amendment went out the window and we lost our right to privacy, I think it's been an Us vs. Them thing. This is a good legal way to fight back against overzealous enforcement practices; flood the enforcers with false positives.

Source: Raw Story

Snicker
Right-wingers are just terrible at art of any sort. I can't reach any other conclusion.

Anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders, whose controversial film Fitna finally hit the web yesterday, has made himself even more unpopular - it appears he forgot to secure copyright on footage used in the movie.

Danish newspaper cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, whose depiction of the Prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban sparked violent protests in 2006, complained on Dutch TV that Wilders used his work without permission, "so it is simply a case of violation of copyright rules".

Earlier this month Westergaard defended Wilders and argued that the Dutch MP should show his film despite government warnings. On behalf of Westergaard, the Danish Union of Journalists says it will now sue Wilders for copyright infringement.

Also, Dutch director Rob Muntz was also surprised to see a clip of an interview he conducted with Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker who was stabbed and shot dead in Amsterdam. Muntz says he never gave permission, and will seek legal advice too.

Wilders also mistakenly used a photo of Dutch-Moroccan rapper Salah Edin instead of Mohammed Bouyeri, Theo van Gogh’s murderer. Edin, perhaps unsurprisingly, is also suing.

Hilarious!

Seriously though, this is why you didn't need to ban the movie, Dutch authorities. In the marketplace of ideas, conservative thought always ends up in the bargain bin.

Source: The Register

Comcasticness
So Comcast has been, it turns out, scamming its viewers on HD broadcasts by secretly pruning the signals. You get the resolution, but it's all distorted and blocky and ugly.

This so they can add more HD channels at a lower cost. Sort of counterproductive, to my mind, if the ones you have suck ass.

This is the way Comcast operates though. And now, I don't say that just because our cable is out at the moment.

Source: AVS Forum

Speaking of Terrible Service
Best Buy!

A Best Buy store in New Jersey foiled one man's treasonous plot to subvert a troubled US economy by discouraging the purchase of an overpriced headset.

According to a report from The Consumerist, the prominent electronics merchant summoned police on a shopper identified as "Alex" because he shared an unfavorable impression of a Jawbone headset to customer considering the product.

Alex told the man browsing Best Buy's mobile section about his personal dissatisfaction with the quality of the Bluetooth headset and noted the retailer marked up the price by $30 compared to his local Verizon store.

A savvy sales associate reportedly overheard Alex's attempted disruption of commerce and promptly informed the nearest authority figure, store's manager, Tom.

Alex was approached by the manager and asked to leave the store. He steadfastly refused — unaware or even perhaps unconcerned that his words wounded Lady Liberty and the national economy she depends upon.

According to Alex, the manager rebutted his insistence that he did nothing wrong by claiming his requested evacuation was "policy." Tom then walked away and instructed an associate to summon the police.

Startled by the rapidly intensifying predicament, Alex attempted to call Best Buy's customer support phone number. He was put on hold.

Two police officers arrived on the scene, accompanied by four Best Buy security clerks to send the subversive customer on his way. Alex was escorted out before he could reach a customer service rep on his phone.

Best Buy of course claims this isn't their policy. But hiring morons apparently is.

Source: The Register

Tower of Babel
A crazy Saudi billionaire is planning to make the world's tallest building.

Tallest by a LOT.

On a clear day, the view from the top will take in the Middle East, North Africa and the Indian Ocean - providing you've a head for heights.

Plans for a mile-high tower in the Saudi Arabian desert have been unveiled by the billionaire owner of London's Savoy Hotel.

At 5,250ft, the £5billion project, masterminded by two British engineering consultancies, will be twice as high as its nearest rivals, skyscrapers under construction in Dubai and Kuwait, and almost seven times as high as the Canary Wharf tower in London's Docklands.

...

It is being planned for a new city near the Red Sea port of Jeddah. Behind the scheme is 51-year-old Prince al-Walid bin Talal, who bought the Savoy for £1.25billion in 2005.

The plan gives the Middle East a clear lead over Asian countries and the U.S., who have vied in the past to construct the world's tallest buildings.

None of the other skyscrapers under construction, including New York's Freedom Tower on the World Trade Centre site, will exceed 2,296ft.

The whole scheme is insane. The plan is for it to be so tall that helicopters have to be used to take workers up and down for the day and haul supplies. The temperature extremes at the top will apparently be crazy.

Still, gutsy. Nice to see Saudi money being used for something constructive, no pun intended.

Source: The Daily Mail

St. John McCain and Letterman
So St. John McCain appeared on Letterman to counter the jokes about how old he is.

Some of his digs, no doubt written by Letterman's talented staff, were pretty funny, but this last one...

Then the Arizona Senator gets in the final zinger: "And you look like the guy who enjoys getting into a hot tub and watching his swim trunks inflate."

What the hell is THAT supposed to mean?

Source: Raw Story

Catalog of Unfit Toys
Hilarious.

Source: Catalog of Unfit Toys

Not a Joke
T-Mobile sent a nastygram to the tech website engadget demanding that they stop using the color magenta, as T-Mobile does in their own logo.

They think they can own a color now.

This has of course led to a number of websites going magenta in response.

Source: Engadget

Even More Political News

2008-04-01T17:45:00.001-04:00

Political

Goooooooooooooooore
So there's chatter about Gore as a consensus candidate for the Dems.

That'd be amazing. But it will never happen. The world is not that kind to me.

Plans for Al Gore to take the Democratic presidential nomination as the saviour of a bitterly divided party are being actively discussed by senior figures and aides to the former vice-president.

The bloody civil war between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has left many Democrats convinced that neither can deliver a knockout blow to the other and that both have been so damaged that they risk losing November's election to the Republican nominee, John McCain.

...

Following a brief flurry of speculation that he might jump into the race last year, Mr Gore claimed he had "fallen out of love" with politics, but he has pointedly refused to rule out another tilt at the White House and said that the only job in public life that interests him is the presidency.

Source: The Telegraph

Tip 'Sharing'
This isn't about the standard 'wait staff share with kitchen staff' sort of thing.

This is where Starbucks stole tips from hourly workers for management.

Starbucks Corp. plans to appeal a San Diego Superior Court ruling last week that ordered the coffee chain to compensate California baristas for tips they shared with shift supervisors.

...

In a separate statement Thursday, Starbucks said there is no money to be "refunded or returned from Starbucks."

The California lawsuit was filed in 2004, and was granted class-action status in 2006. Last week, San Diego Superior Court Judge Patricia Cowett ordered Starbucks to pay baristas more than $100 million in back tips and interest, saying state law prohibits managers and supervisors from taking a cut from the tip jar. A hearing is set for May 1 before Cowett on how the California tip money should be distributed.

Starbucks responded in the statement that "shift supervisors are not managers and have no managerial authority," and customers don't differentiate between the supervisors and baristas when they tip.

Cowett also issued an injunction preventing Starbucks' shift supervisors from sharing in future tips, but Starbucks spokeswoman Valerie O'Neil said it would not comply with that order while it appeals the court decision.

Right. The 'supervisor' has no managerial authority.

I'm sorry, but this is absurd. Management stealing from the tip jars? Seriously?

Give me a break. When they want to break a union, companies call nurses 'managers'; when they want to steal from workers, they call managers 'shift supervisors'.

They don't just want to have their cake and eat it too; they want yours.

Source: Raw Story

End Game
So, how does a longtime insurgency, like the one we're facing in Iraq, actually end?

Simple. It ends when everyone gets exhausted.

The first time I visited Belfast, in 1977, it was a city under siege. Stores were closed. British bunkers protected by anti-rocket meshing sat on most intersections. Police and military patrols were the only sign of life on the street. The Europa, which had to be the most bombed hotel in the world, was a sandbagged fortress.

On paper at least, the 1998 agreement between the IRA and the British government was what started to put an end to the violent conflict. But at the bottom of it the IRA lost the will to fight.

This year's IRA parade on Easter morning was one of the most anodyne, sentimentalized events I've ever seen, made up mostly of little boys and old men not even bothering to pose as veterans. A half a dozen marchers carried wooden rifles, but the Republican banners were furled — on orders from the IRA's leadership. Armored police Land Rovers were parked inconspicuously on side streets, but they were there to protect the marchers from Protestants rather than keep a watch on them.

Any lingering doubt I had that the conflict was truly over disappeared when I saw the Europa. There wasn't even a car bomb barrier out front. The place was full of families, many of them American, coming home for Easter. Ex-IRA foot soldiers out front offered driving tours of the old IRA battlefields. Who would ever have thought Northern Ireland would be turned into a theme park?

...

But it wasn't just in Northern Ireland that there was an end to violence. I was in Palermo on Good Friday and met the city's police chief. It's been 15 years since the Sicilian Mafia has been blowing up judges and prosecutors. Is the violence over? "If I dare say it, it is," the police chief said. "The Mafia figured out it just wasn't worth it, the killing and bombing, drawing the fury of Rome."

To be sure, the Mafia still runs Sicily. But like the IRA it is an anodyne force. It is moving into white-collar crime — where the real money is and the sentences are lighter.

...

Before I left Beirut last week I sat down with a member of Hizballah's politburo. He didn't look anything like the old Hizballah I knew from the '80s. For a start he asked to meet in the posh Vendome Hotel, in the rooftop restaurant that has a commanding view over the Corniche and the Mediterranean. Clean shaven and carrying a new leather briefcase, he offered me a Cuban cigar as soon as he sat down. He had just come from a class teaching economics.

We started off talking about the Hizballah military commander Imad Mughniyah, who was assassinated in Damascus on February 12. "Yes, indeed," he said in fluent English, "Hizballah will absolutely have to respond. But not now. There is too much too lose."

He added that he thought that it was unfortunate the West focuses only on Hizballah's military wing. "Can't anyone see Hizballah is just as much about an economic revolution as it is fighting Israel?"

People complain about the Godfather Pt. III endlessly, but it turns out that the portrayal of the end of the Corleone family was fairly accurate. When people tire of violence, they end up moving on to something else, often something more lucrative.

Source: Time.com

Sign of the Times
The housing crisis has become so bad that looters are stealing the copper pipes from old houses, which are worth significantly more than the houses they're found inside.

Similar stories are unfolding nationwide as a glut of home foreclosures coincides with record highs in the price of copper and other metals.

Real estate brokers and local authorities say once-proud homes coast-to-coast are being stripped for copper, aluminum, and brass by thieves. Much of it ends up with scrap metal traders who say nearly all copper gets shipped overseas, much of it to China and India.

In areas hit hardest by foreclosures, such as the Slavic Village neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, copper and other metals used in plumbing, heating systems and telephone lines are now more valuable than some homes.

"We're in an incredibly unfortunate time where the nonferrous metals commodities market for scrap is at an all-time high. Houses are getting stripped pretty quickly once they go through the foreclosure process," Cleveland city councilor Tony Brancatelli said.

"We're seeing houses sold for $100 that are distressed houses that should not be recycled," he said. Some boarded-up homes in his Slavic Village community have "No copper, only PVC" painted on the boards to stop would-be thieves.

This isn't a joke; houses can go for less than the price of their telephone wiring.

Thanks a lot, El Presidente!

Source: Raw Story

A Picture Says 4 Thousand Names
Portrait of El Presidente and St. John McCain, made from the composite of pictures of the four thousand people we've lost in Iraq.

Source: Huffington Post

Cesar Chavez Day
Clinton and Obama are working to one-up each other, but for a change, in a good way.

Cesar Chavez Day.

That's what Barack Obama is endorsing: A national holiday in honor of the late, legendary activist for farmworker rights (pictured below).

Today is Chavez's birthday -- and Hillary Clinton's campaign was the first to draw attention to that this morning, issuing a statement celebrating the 81st anniversary of Chavez's birth (he died on April 23, 1993).

But Obama, who has struggled to overcome Clinton's significant advantage among Latino voters in state after state, sought to one-up his rival for the Democratic presidential nod by joining the call for creating a national holiday to commemorate the father of the United Farm Workers.

Now if we could only get them doing this on Iraq.

Source: The LA Times

Enough Already

Noah Shachtman at Danger Room finds a 2006 report written for U.S. Special Operations Command that suggests ways the military should deal with the blogosphere. One suggestion is for the military to hire bloggers to “pass the U.S. message“:

Information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence…to pass the U.S. message. … On the other hand, such operations can have a blowback effect, as witnessed by the public reaction following revelations that the U.S. military had paid journalists to publish stories in the Iraqi press under their own names. People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.

An alternative strategy is to “make” a blog and blogger. The process of boosting the blog to a position of influence could take some time, however, and depending on the person running the blog, may impose a significant educational burden, in terms of cultural and linguistic training before the blog could be put online to any useful effect. Still, there are people in the military today who like to blog.

Yeah. This isn't the least bit unseemly.

Source: Think Progress

Primaries
I can't believe I agree with a Florida politician, but I've been saying the same basic thing for a while now.

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) appeared on CNN to slam both the Democratic Party nominating process and the Electoral College.

Nelson said he would like to abolish the Electoral College entirely, because "people are increasingly dissatisfied when you can have the most votes for president and the other candidate ... ends up being elected, as last happened in the year 2000."

He is also proposing to do away with the current presidential nominating procedures in favor of six large regional primaries, which would be held between March and June of every presidential election year in an order to be determined by drawing lots.

CBS's John Roberts did not comment on the merits of Nelson's proposal, but merely noted that "Iowa and New Hampshire are going to scream bloody murder."

"Of course they're going to kick up and scream, "Nelson replied, "but those states are not representative of America as a whole and why should they have an outsized influence?"

The regional primary is a neat idea. It would curtail travel costs and provide a logical grouping, so that regional issues and focuses would be retained.

On the other hand, 'region' is a bit hard to define. California is big enough and powerful enough to count as its own country. It would easily qualify as two or three regions of its own. On the other hand, the South may be a series of states, but demographically and politically they comprise, with the exception of Florida, one big bloc of Stupid.

I'd suggest a rotation for primaries, with first year determined by lots, rather than lots each time. That could lead to a run of one area being first or last that would be unpleasant.

Other than that, not a shabby plan. As for Iowa and New Hamsphire? Fuck 'em. The current system is the height of anti-democratic behavior.

Source: Raw Story

Death of Death Benefit
So Chrysler is screwing over their middle rank white collar workers.

Chrysler LLC's white-collar retirees are losing free life insurance benefits but are eligible for a one-time pension boost of up to $4,000, according to a letter retirees should receive this week.

Previously retirees were covered by a life insurance policy at no charge, with a death benefit equal to their last year of pay, for those who retired before 2003, or $50,000 for those who retired after that.

Chrysler is allowing affected retirees a one-time opportunity to buy into a voluntary plan through MetLife at a reduced, group rate.

...

On one hand, retirees' families are less likely to need the life insurance payout to support a family or pay off a mortgage, Wise said. On the other, the cost of a 65-year old obtaining even a 20-year term plan is steep -- $1,600 a year or more, he said.

...

White-collar retirees will receive from $1,000 to $4,000, depending on their years of service and years since retirement. They may choose to take the payment as a one-time lump sum, roll it into an Individual Retirement Account, or have it paid as part of their monthly benefit.

So they get at most 4 grand in exchange for losing 20+ grand of insurance premiums.

Oh yeah, what a bargain!

Still think we don't need white collar unions?

Source: The Detroit News

King Corn
The Ethanol Lobby strikes again.

BB&T Capital Markets analyst said Monday corn rationing may be necessary this year, following a U.S. Department of Agriculture report predicting farmers would plant far fewer acres of corn in 2008.

According to the March Prospective Plantings Report, farmers intend to plant about 86 million acres of corn this year, down 8 percent from 2007, when the amount of corn planted was the highest since World War II.

Analyst Heather L. Jones said in a note to investors if the USDA estimate proves accurate, the year may produce just 200 million bushels of corn. That, she said, wouldn't be enough to meet demand, given current export and feed demand trends and higher ethanol demand. Both ethanol and animal feed are made with corn.

...

Shares of Tyson Foods Inc., one of the world's largest meat companies, fell 12 cents to $16.01 in afternoon trading, while shares of pork producer Smithfield Foods Inc. dropped 39 cents to $25.57.

Chicken producer Pilgrim's Pride Corp. shares dipped 19 cents to $20.28. Earlier in the day, the stock reached a new four-year low of $20.08.

Thanks a lot, Flexfuel Fuckers.

Thanks a lot.

Source: Raw Story

Hagee Video
This is still in my browser window from quite a while ago.

Man it's been in there forever.

Source: Attytood

Random and Disturbing News

2008-04-01T16:35:00.002-04:00

Disturbing and Disgusting

Dolphin Raid
Here's a story that's so grotesque and seemingly far-fetched that it's hard to believe.

For the first time ever, graphic feature-length footage of the annual slaughter of some 2,500 dolphins in Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture, has been captured during a unique yearlong covert operation.

The secret filming by members of the U.S. conservation group Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS) — equipped with state-of-the-art technology and financed to the tune of $5 million by Netscape founder Jim Clark — is being turned into a major documentary feature film destined for worldwide release this summer (although distribution in Japan is at present not certain).

The story of how this film of the barbaric killing and subsequent butchering of dolphins was made — together with the resulting sale of their meat that massively exceeds Japanese and international limits for mercury content — is told here, exclusively, for the first time anywhere in print.

That's right; an eco-group with big money backing staged what can only be described as a Black Op to get extensive documentary evidence of a secretive dolphin slaughter in Japan.

Just the still photographs are horrifying. But quite frankly, to me, the sheer scale of this operation is more interesting than the abject cruelty.

I mean, we live in a world chock full of abject cruelty.

The footage of the annual seven-month dolphin "drive fisheries" (as they are known in Japan), and of the brutal practices involved in them — as well as the complicity in the killings by various dolphin trainers and officials from Taiji Whale Museum — is sure to shock the world. But whether Japanese people themselves will be able to see the film and arrive at their own conclusions is still by no means certain.

The annual dolphin slaughter at Taiji, a town with a population of some 3,500 in the beautiful Yoshino Kumano Kokuritsu Koen national park, follows a regular pattern.

First, hunter boats from the Taiji Isana Union (numbering at most 13 skiffs, with two crewmen each) head out to sea and surround pods of dolphins or pilot whales (which are actually large dolphins). Then they drive them into a "capture cove" by banging on long metal bell-ended poles placed in the water to disrupt the dolphins' sonar, causing them to become completely disorientated and panic.

After these animals have spent a night supposedly relaxing in the netted-off capture cove (in an attempt by the whalers to make their meat more tender), they are driven to the neighboring "killing cove." There, behind huge blue tarps strung across the cove to keep prying eyes away — in much the same way that Japanese police cordon off crime scenes — the dolphins meet their gruesome predawn end.

Terry Pratchett says something about the nature of evil in Carpe Jugulum, I forget the exact quote, but the sentiment was that the worst sort of evil isn't the kind that goes on in the dead of night, but the sort that plods methodically, dispassionately forward in grey, daylight monotony. In the book he's referencing, amongst other things, the Nazis, but the analogy holds here too. Truly nasty, inhuman behavior reaches its apex not with the lunatic carving up prostitutes, but with the commandant running the camps, or here, the whalers mutilating semi-sentient creatures to make toxic food.

From their base in Boulder, Colorado, the OPS group made six trips to Wakayama Prefecture, where they were constantly followed by local police and stalked and harassed by Taiji "whalers." Despite this, their mission was successful. Their high-tech film gear was covertly inserted in the "killing cove" and extracted 16 times thanks to the efforts of the film's assistant director, Charles Hambleton, and three members of the OPS team. Their hidden, high-definition (HD) cameras successfully recorded the horror that unfolded behind Taiji's blue tarps. And what they saw was beyond their belief.

Captured dolphins were filmed writhing in pain as Taiji whalers speared them repeatedly or cracked their spines with spiked weapons. Stricken dolphins are also shown thrashing about wildly, blood pouring from their wounds until they finally succumbed. Meanwhile, a number of dolphin trainers and officials from the Taiji Whale Museum are shown cooperating in the slaughter — some even laughing — as the killing cove's bloodied, ruby-red water swept round into the adjacent capture cove.

But perhaps the most iconic scene is one in which a baby dolphin leaps to its death on the rocks after its mother is killed. This really was a surreal and incredibly sad sight to see.

Surreal doesn't begin to describe it.

The lengths they had to go to in order to produce the documentary are equally surreal, to my mind.

With funding from billionaire conservationist Clark, the team was able to use the most sophisticated equipment money could buy. Among their weapons of choice were a battery of HD cameras. Some of those cameras were encased in fake rocks sculpted out of high-density foam by movie-model makers with Kerner Optical (formerly George "Star Wars" Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic Shop). These disguised cameras were strat- egically positioned inside the killing cove.

Also included in the formidable lineup of high-tech gear for this covert operation were standard-size HD cameras, $50,000 military-grade HD forward-looking infrared (FLIR) P-645 thermal cameras (to detect anyone the whalers had on lookout); hydrophones and HD underwater cameras (to record the dolphins' underwater throes); unmanned gyro-stabilized helicopters; a number of "shotgun" microphones disguised as tree branches; walkie-talkies; and a host of ancillary equipment.

The mission objective was to produce a well-balanced, full-length documentary feature for general worldwide release encompassing all facets of the Taiji dolphin cull and its health risks.

"We succeeded," Psihoyos said, "but we also came back with an epic horror film resembling a Steven King novel more than a documentary."

...

To make this possible, OPS called on Mandy-Rae Cruickshank, a seven-time world free-diving champion, and her famed coach and husband, Kirk Krack, to plant the devices. (Cruikshank recently broke her own world record by free-diving down to 88 meters and back in 2 min. 48 sec.) Both eagerly accepted the risky challenge.

"Good to go Mandy," crackled through the two-way. It was 3 a.m. The OPS support group on land had just completed a thermal-imaging sweep of the capture and killing coves. No security was detected. As the OPS van dropped the two off above the holding cove's small beach, and sped away, the free-diving pair, clad in wet suits, entered the water. The moon was full, helping them to see obstacles.

"Tensions were high . . . we had to get around a barbed-wire fence and hike down over some boulders to get into the water," Mandy said. "Then we swam around to the killing cove. It was about 40 feet (12 meters) deep. We had an underwater camera and hydrophone, and we used a flashlight to get a reference point so we knew where to retrieve them from after we made a reconnaissance, but we had to turn it on and off quickly to escape detection. Then Kirk and I put down the devices fairly easily."

...

Meanwhile, Psihoyos' team was embedded in their camera blinds on overlooking hillsides, sometimes for as long as 17 hours a day. Dressed in full camouflage gear and wearing face paint, they looked like military sniper teams. Black masking tape covered reflective surfaces on their cameras to avoid detection. For over 3 1/2 weeks, the OPS team survived on a daily ration of 3 hours' sleep. When filming from the camera blinds, they subsisted on energy bars and water. Whaler security men, always wary of outsiders monitoring their hunts, constantly scanned the high terrain, the bushes and undergrowth surrounding the two coves, their flashlights searching for intruders.

Psihoyos recounted his attempt in setting up the initial camera blind in a spot overlooking the killing cove.

"It was a moonless night and I had a full-size def (HD) camera in tow with a large tripod. I scaled a cliff and descended on a rope and perched on a shelf as big as an average office desk — but at a slope of about 30 degrees.

"I braced my feet against a small tree and didn't move them for the next 15 1/2 hours," he said, adding, "the lagoon was filled with pilot whales — they made a protective circle around their young. I shot frantic clips from my unstable perch as I saw whales killed and dragged away."

The whole thing is worth a read. These people put our National Intelligence to shame, that's for sure.

Source: The Japan Times

White Stickers
This is a combination of truly sad/pathetic and hilarious.

Two narcotics officers were demoted from an elite strike force and suspended without pay because of racially offensive stickers found inside a police department locker.

Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey this week punished officers Scott Schweizer and Eric Dial, transferring the pair out of the Narcotics Strike Force to routine patrol in districts where they started as rookies. The officers were also each suspended for 20 days without pay and prohibited from using vacation days toward the unpaid leave.

Two racist stickers were found inside Schweizer's locker. One sticker read: "White Power." The other depicted a cartoon of a man, half as an officer in uniform and half as a Klansman, with the words "Blue By Day — White By Night."

...

An Internal Affairs Bureau investigation concluded that Dial created the stickers and put them on Schweizer's locker in the narcotics strike force headquarters in the city's Bridesburg section, Ramsey said.

White Power... stickers?

Excuse me?

Is this what the white supremacist movement is reduced to? STICKERS?

That's progress.

Source: Raw Story

Wowser
This was sort of inevitable.

North Dakota State University is investigating the NDSU Saddle and Sirloin Club and sorority Alpha Gamma Delta after a racially charged performance at the Mr. NDSU Pageant. The performance featured a student in black face depicting presidential candidate Barack Obama receiving a lap dance while two students dressed as cowboys mimicked anal sex in the background. The Saddle and Sirloin Club, a club for students at the Fargo campus interested in animal agriculture, performed the lip-synching number in front of an audience of 500 people.

...

A pageant contestant from Saddle and Sirloin dressed as the woman from the popular Internet video "I Got a Crush on Obama" and performed for another student who was wearing dark makeup and an afro wig.

In the background, two male students dressed as cowboys simulated anal sex while holding an Obama sign that one student ripped at the conclusion of the 30-second performance.

Wow. Blackface, Obama with strippers... this is some classy school they've got in North Dakota, huh?

Source: Minnesota Monitor

Bowling for Morons
This is just surreal.

Summary: On Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough and Willie Geist repeatedly mocked Sen. Barack Obama's bowling performance -- which Scarborough called "dainty" -- at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania. Deriding Obama's score, Scarborough said: "You know Willie, the thing is, Americans want their president, if it's a man, to be a real man." He added, "You get 150, you're a man, or a good woman," to which Geist replied, "Out of my president, I want a 150, at least." After guest Harold Ford Jr. said that Obama's bowling showed a "humble" and "human" side to him, Scarborough replied, "A very human side? A prissy side."

It's also what you'd expect when you hire a former Republican congressman as a TV host. The stupid, it burns!

Seriously, what possible relevance does the bowling performance of a Presidential candidate have? Obama is apparently not much of a bowler, let alone a regular one. But even if he was, and sucked, who cares?

Is bowling a major component of Presidential work these days?

Give me a break. Yet again, Republicans try to feminize the Democratic candidate (or hyper-masculinize Clinton), playing the gender bashing card in a sad, outmoded attempt to sway the white male bigot vote.

Are we really supposed to believe St. John McCain, 72, is a star athlete? Even ignoring the damage to his arms from the POW camp, I mean, he's a decrepit mummy.

Source: Media Matters

Basketball?
Fresh from bashing Obama because he's bad at bowling (and thus a woman), MSNBC had another host, Chris Matthews, go on the air to state that Obama was bound to be good at basketball because he's black.

Summary: On Hardball, discussing Sen. Barack Obama's bowling performance at a campaign stop, Chris Matthews said to MSNBC political analyst Michelle Bernard, "You know, Michelle -- and this gets very ethnic, but the fact that he's good at basketball doesn't surprise anybody, but the fact that he's that terrible at bowling does make you wonder." While showing the video of Obama's bowling, Matthews asserted, "[I]t isn't the most macho form there."

Wow.

Just... wow.

Source: Media Matters

Lou Dobbs!
So Lou Dobbs got sick of, err, being told not to be a racist by uppity blacks.

Racial healer Lou Dobbs explains how he's sick of "cotton pickin'" black leaders telling him how he can and can't talk about race (he catches himself at the last minute -- sorta) ...

What is WRONG with Cable News these days?

Source: Talking Points Memo

Third Graders?!
Third Graders!

WAYCROSS, GA -- It's the type of news you don't expect to hear coming out of an elementary school. Nine third grade students suspended at Center Elementary in Waycross for an alleged plot to attack their teacher.

"This plot was uncovered at the point that something dangerous was brought to the school," says Lt. Dwayne Caswell with Waycross Police.

Police say the students were hatching a plan to harm their teacher Friday morning. They even brought items from home to carry out the plan.

"They had a broken steak knife, a crystal paper weight, toy handcuffs, several items and tape and stuff," says Lt. Caswell.

THIRD GRADERS?!

Also, before people get all upset about the 'degeneration of modern culture', it's worth noting that child soldiers and killers and what not are hardly an uncommon phenomenon or confined to the West. It's also worth noting that the kids had a mix of weapons and, err, toys.

Yeah.

Source: First Coast News

Circus Slaves
Now this is just bizarre stuff.

ROME (Reuters) - Police rescued two teenage Bulgarian sisters from a circus in southern Italy which forced one of them to swim with flesh-eating piranhas for the amusement of guests, police said.

While the 19-year-old sister swam in a transparent tank, the younger, 16-year-old was forced into a container where the circus staff tossed snakes at her. She was injured by one of the snakes, police said.

Police arrested three Italians who ran the circus south of Naples, in Salerno province, accusing them of forcing the sisters to live in virtual slavery.

The women were paid 100 euros ($155.8) per week and lived in a trailer that had previously been used to transport animals, they said.

I would ask how people could watch that, but honestly, circus performers often do some pretty bizarre or dangerous things. At the Dark Carnival we saw a guy (a highly paid professional there of his own free will, of course) put his face in a pile of broken glass and have an audience woman stand on the back of his head. Well, step on it at least.

Still, you'd at least worry about the poor snakes, right?

Source: Reuters

Science Post

2008-04-01T09:04:00.002-04:00

Sciencey

Protein
New technologies might make blood tests far less routine.

US researchers have identified all the 1,166 proteins in human saliva in a breakthrough which could become a new tool for diagnosing killer diseases like cancer, a study showed Tuesday.

Patients may soon be able to spit in a cup for tests for such illnesses as cancer, heart disease and diabetes thanks to the work of three teams of researchers.

"Replacing blood draws with saliva tests promises to make disease diagnosis, as well as the tracking of treatment efficacy, less invasive and costly," said the study published in the Journal of Proteome Research.

Aside from being less... prickly, it's also likely to be cheaper and definitely less dangerous for the medical personnel.

Source: Raw Story

Sun Worship
Solar power is starting to take off.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Utility Southern California Edison said on Thursday it would spend $875 million to build a network of 250 megawatts of photovoltaic solar power generation, making it the biggest solar cell project in the nation.

SCE, a subsidiary of Edison International, said the photovoltaic cells on 65 million square feet of rooftops in southern California would generate enough power to serve 162,000 homes.

The project, which was submitted to state regulators for approval, is an effort to meet the state's mandate that 20 percent of California's electricity be generated from renewable sources by 2010.

Utilities and power companies are increasing their portfolios of renewable energy to meet ever-increasing state demands to help reduce their output of carbon, the greenhouse gas blamed for contributing to rising global temperatures.

At 250 megawatts, the installation would be about half the size of the newest coal or natural gas-fired power generation units.

...

On Wednesday, FPL Group Inc, the nation's largest generator of wind and solar power, announced it planned to build a 250-megawatt thermal solar plant in California's Mojave Desert.

SCE said its new photovoltaic project was possible because recent advances had cut in half the traditional cost of installed solar generation in California.

The utility plans to begin installing the solar arrays immediately on to the rooftops of commercial buildings in southern California's Inland Empire, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

"These new solar stations, which we will be installing at a rate of one megawatt a week, will provide a new source of clean energy directly in the fast-growing regions where we need it most," Edison International Chairman and Chief Executive John Bryson said in a statement.

So between both projects you're talking 500 megawatts of solar power.

That's a lot of juice.

But still a very long way to go.

Source: Reuters

Squidy
Learning the terrifying secrets of squid brings us closer to understanding the Horror that is the Doctor.

"For years the razor-sharp beak that squid use to eat their prey has posed a puzzle to scientists. Squid are soft and fragile, but have a beak as dense as rock and sharp enough to break through hard shells. Scientists have long wondered why the beak doesn't injure the squid itself as is uses it. New research has just been published in the the journal Science that explains the phenomenon. One of the researchers described the squid beak as 'like placing an X-Acto blade in a block of fairly firm Jell-O and then trying to use it to chop celery.' Careful examination shows that the beak is formed in a gradient of density, becoming harder towards the tip end. Understanding how to make such hardness gradients could revolutionize engineering anywhere that 'interfaces between soft and hard materials [are required].' One of the first applications researchers envision is prosthetic limbs."

I've never seen his horrifying beak, as it is hidden behind his tentacles. No one wants to see behind that.

A bit more detail on the beak.

That deadly beak may be a surprise to many people, and has long posed a puzzle for scientists. They wonder how a creature without any bones can operate it without hurting itself.

Now, researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, report in Friday's edition of the journal Science that they have an explanation

The beak, made of hard chitin and other materials, changes density gradually from the hard tip to a softer, more flexible base where it attaches to the muscle around the squid's mouth, the researchers found.

That means the tough beak can chomp away at fish for dinner, but the hard material doesn't press or rub directly against the squid's softer tissues.

Oh, the horrors of Doctor Calimari.

Source: Slashdot
CBC News

Molybdenum
So apparently there may have been a 2 billion year delay in the rise of complex life because of a shortage of the metal molybdenum.

Scientists from around the world have reconstructed changes in Earth’s ancient ocean chemistry during a broad sweep of geological time, from about 2.5 to 0.5 billion years ago. They have discovered that a deficiency of oxygen and the heavy metal molybdenum in the ancient deep ocean may have delayed the evolution of animal life on Earth for nearly 2 billion years.

Apparently as the oxygen in the atmosphere rose, it leeched molybdenum out of the rocks, solving this problem. Today it seems the metal short in the oceans is iron instead.

Fascinating.

Source: Physorg

Legal Eagle
Well, there's a bit of a kerfluffle on about the Large Hadron Collider.

A lawsuit has been filed in Hawaii in an attempt to hold up the start of operations by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) atom-smasher on the French-Swiss border.

A colourful American botanist, teacher, former biologist and sometime physicist says (in outline) that the LHC may rip a hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum and so destroy the Earth. He wants the US government to act now and delay the LHC's startup while a new safety review is carried out.

Walter L Wagner and his fellow Hawaiian Luis Sancho, according to a report on MSNBC, filed suit in the Hawaii federal court last Friday. The men are worried about one of several planet-busting physicists' nightmares being unleashed in the LHC's bowels deep beneath the Franco-Swiss countryside. (According to Wagner's website, as of publication, the LHC is located "near Generva, Switzerland".)

Firstly Wagner is concerned that careless atom boffins might slip up and create a miniature black hole. This would then suck in surrounding mass, gaining unstoppably in size and power in a runaway process until it had engulfed the entire Earth and packed it down inside its swelling, unescapable event horizon.

Some physicists have theorised that black holes might act as spacewarp wormhole portals into alternate universes, or something. Summarising, it appears that the boffins at the LHC - should one of them clumsily spill his tea on the controls, for instance - could easily catapult the entire world through a rift in the very fabric of space-time, into another universe which could be entirely hostile to life as we know it. (Eg, essential processes such as fermentation of alcohol, TV, pizza delivery, gravity etc might simply not work; or there could be a parallel Earth ruled by an evil victorious Nazi empire with space battlecruisers and so forth.)

That would be bad: but even if the LHC guys manage to avoid it, there are other ways in which their meddling might destroy the world.

A particularly violent game of proton billiards, for instance, of the very sort the LHC's superpowered seven trillion electron-volt atomic cues are designed to play, might lead to all sorts of trouble. Quarks might get mixed up into "negatively-charged strangelets" which would turn everything else they touched into strangelets as well. The Earth, and then perhaps the entire universe, could be turned into a fearful strangelet soup; or perhaps custard.

A related worry is that overly vigorous particle-punishing tomfoolery at the LHC could produce "magnetic monopoles", which are dicey freaks of nature. Monopoles could trigger a runaway reaction not unlike the quark-strangelet scenario, in which everything gets changed into something else. This could lead to a turn-up for the books, in which the Moon remained made of moon but the Earth was abruptly converted into cheese.

...

The boffinry community, however, pooh-pooh Wagner's fears. They say that teeny black holes might be created but would vanish right away. They also say that the strangelet-custard conversion and monopole transmutation threats, if they were viable, should have occurred already due to cosmic-ray impacts in the upper atmosphere.

The man in question has a colorful history, and is currently facing serious legal trouble over, err, embezzling a lot of money.

Oops.

Wagner is, in fact, an expert in many fields. In his first degree at Berkeley he majored in biology and minored in physics. He then attended law school for three years, and later worked in nuclear medicine and health physics before becoming a grade-school teacher. He also founded the World Botanical Gardens in Umauma, Hawaii, and is now embroiled in a bitter legal battle with the Gardens board. According to the Hawaii Tribune-Herald (free registration required), he and his wife were indicted last month by a grand jury on counts of identity theft and attempted theft relating to an alleged attempt to obtain $340,000 from the gardens company.

Wagner contends that the couple were owed the cash, having worked for free at the gardens for years. Having been let go, they then sued the company for back pay.

But the company says the pair failed to notify the directors of the action, with Wagner instead serving the papers on his wife as company treasurer - even though she no longer was. The board says that Wagner then appeared in court as a company officer. He was thus able to gain a default judgement in his own lawsuit's favour, all without the knowledge of the Gardens board. It is also alleged that phony promissory notes were drawn up in an attempt to obtain cash from the company.

So he sued himself in his role as a member of the company, then paid himself off.

Gutsy.

Source: The Register

Sodom
It seems that yet another biblical miracle may have a perfectly reasonable explanation from the real world.

A Cuneiform clay tablet which for over 150 years defied attempts at interpretation has now been revealed to describe an asteroid impact which in 3123 BC hit Köfels, Austria, leaving in its wake a trail of destruction which may acccount for the biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The "Planisphere" tablet (see pic) - inscribed around 700 BC - was unearthed by Henry Layard in the remains of the library of the Assyrian royal palace at Nineveh, close to modern-day Mosul, Iraq. It's a copy of the night diary of a Sumerian astronomer containing drawings of constellations and "known constellation names", but it required modern computer tech to finally unravel its exact meaning.

Alan Bond, Managing Director of Reaction Engines Ltd and Mark Hempsell, Senior Lecturer in Astronautics at Bristol University, subjected the Planisphere to a programme which "can simulate trajectories and reconstruct the night sky thousands of years ago". They discovered that it described "events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC", with half of it noting "planet positions and cloud cover, the same as any other night".

The other half, however, records an object "large enough for its shape to be noted even though it is still in space" and tracks its trajectory relative to the stars, which "to an error better than one degree is consistent with an impact at Köfels".

That a large body had impacted at Köfels had long been suspected, the evidence being a giant landslide 500m thick and five kilometres in diameter. The site had no impact crater to back the theory, but the researchers now believe they have a plausible explanation for that.

The Bristol Uni press release explains: "The observation suggests the asteroid is over a kilometre in diameter and the original orbit about the Sun was an Aten type, a class of asteroid that orbit close to the earth, that is resonant with the Earth’s orbit. This trajectory explains why there is no crater at Köfels.

"The in coming angle was very low (six degrees) and means the asteroid clipped a mountain called Gamskogel above the town of Längenfeld, 11 kilometres from Köfels, and this caused the asteroid to explode before it reached its final impact point.

"As it travelled down the valley it became a fireball, around five kilometres in diameter (the size of the landslide). When it hit Köfels it created enormous pressures that pulverised the rock and caused the landslide but because it was no longer a solid object it did not create a classic impact crater."

Mark Hempsell, hinting at the possible fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, adds: “Another conclusion can be made from the trajectory. The back plume from the explosion (the mushroom cloud) would be bent over the Mediterranean Sea re-entering the atmosphere over the Levant, Sinai, and Northern Egypt.

“The ground heating though very short would be enough to ignite any flammable material - including human hair and clothes. It is probable more people died under the plume than in the Alps due to the impact blast.“

Essentially what you're dealing with here is the space equivalent of the pyroclastic flow you get from a volcanic explosion. An asteroid came in at a very, very shallow angle, tore a chunk out of a mountain and threw up a big cloud of debris which came down across the Mediterranean.

Add this to the list of Bible stories that may be explained, along with Noah's Ark (stolen from Sumerian mythology, possibly a reference to the Black Sea's formation), the parting of the Red Sea (possible wind anomaly, not that Egypt ever lost an army there), the plague of locusts (this one's not even hard, they happened all the time in the old west -- it's a natural phenomenon), etc.

Science is awesome.

Source: The Register

Delivery Charges May Apply
So the Europeans have devised a new, automated delivery vehicle for the ISS. It hauls up food, water, supplies, what have you, without anyone on board, and is more or less completely automated.

The European Space Agency's "Jules Verne" Automated Transfer Vehicle is slowly but surely creeping up on the International Space Station prior to a docking scheduled for 3 April.

The ATV space truck will today strut its stuff on the second of two "demonstration days" designed to test the rendevous tech. On Saturday, a first demo proved the vessel can perform "navigation with the ISS using relative GPS to successfully and safely manoeuvre the spacecraft to a point located 3.5 km behind the ISS and at the same orbital altitude".

John Ellwood, ESA’s ATV Project Manager, explained: "Having tested very successfully on Saturday the first part of the rendezvous, in particular using the relative GPS between that on Jules Verne and on the Russian Service Module of the ISS, we now have the go-ahead to test the second part of the rendezvous which uses the [laser-based] optical sensors. This will be very interesting, but we have a lot of confidence based on the great performance of Jules Verne during the first demonstration day."

This is a key stopgap measure to help cover for the retirement of the Shuttle fleet, since we don't have anything to replace them. The Jules Verne can haul up the bulky stuff and the Soyuz from the Russkies will have to haul up the people.

Source: The Register

Mmm, Pickled Liver
A possible cure for severe liver damage caused by booze or hepatitus.

Japanese boffins believe they may have developed a means of reversing cirrhosis of the liver among rats and perhaps people, in a development with far-reaching consequences for professional cricketers, hellraising movie stars, layabout drunks, politicians, economists, Catholic priests, journalists and others whose jobs require them to drink heavily.

...

Rather, these rodents were subjected to normally-lethal doses of dimethylnitrosamine, a deadly liver-busting chemical which was commonly found in beer and bacon sandwiches until the 1970s. Nowadays 90 per cent of the stuff has been removed from human food. However, Sato and his colleagues were able to feed distilled essence of market-traders' breakfast to their furry subjects and cause their livers to pack up almost right away, thus sparing themselves an extended period of devastating miniature murine hellraiser Oliver Reed type antics in the lab.

The boffins were then able to save - or at least "prolong the survival" of - the cirrhotic rats by treating them with "vitamin A–coupled liposomes" which delivered "small interfering RNA (siRNA)" to "stellate cells" in the liver. It is these stellate cells, seemingly, which cause cirrhosis by producing collagen in response to booze or hepatitis. The collagen then hardens up the liver and wrecks it.

But when the small interfering RNA payloads get at the stellate cells, all this stops and the liver is recalled to duty - indeed, the Japanese scientists imply that already-existing collagen can be dissolved, effectively making the the organ as good as new. This is good news, as until now the only treatment for cirrhosis has been to get a new liver from someone who doesn't need theirs - hopefully due to having died peacefully in a car crash or something, rather than having been judicially murdered by an unscrupulous government and harvested for spare parts - and who hasn't put too many miles on it already.

W00t! This is great news for Basement Boy!

Source: The Register

What's Good for the Goose
Is hilarious for the gander.

A hacker club has published what it says is the fingerprint of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany's interior minister and a staunch supporter of the collection of citizens' unique physical characteristics as a means of preventing terrorism.

In the most recent issue of Die Datenschleuder, the Chaos Computer Club printed the image on a plastic foil that leaves fingerprints when it is pressed against biometric readers.

...

"The whole research has always been inspired by showing how insecure biometrics are, especially a biometric that you leave all over the place," said Karsten Nohl, a colleague of an amateur researcher going by the moniker Starbug, who engineered the hack. "It's basically like leaving the password to your computer everywhere you go without you being able to control it anymore."

...

Schauble's fingerprint was captured off a water glass he used last summer while participating in a discussion celebrating the opening of a religious studies department at the University of Humboldt in Berlin. The print came from an index finger, most likely the right one, Starbug believes, because Schauble is right-handed.

...

The print is included in more than 4,000 copies of the latest issue of the magazine, which is published by the CCC. The image is printed two ways: one using traditional ink on paper, and the other on a film of flexible rubber that contains partially dried glue. The latter medium can be covertly affixed to a person's finger and used to leave an individual's prints on doors, telephones or biometric readers.

Nohl said Starbug has used the same film to store his own fingerprints and has successfully fooled 20 different biometric readers, including those deployed in Germany's own passport offices. The machines, made by a company known as Cross Match Technologies, are in the process of being rolled out by German customs officials at border checkpoints, Nohl said.

Schauble is a big proponent of using fingerprints and other unique characteristics to identify individuals.

“Each individual’s fingerprints are unique," he is quoted as saying in this official interior department press release announcing a new electronic passport that stores individuals' fingerprints on an RFID chip. "This technology will help us keep one step ahead of criminals. With the new passport, it is possible to conduct biometric checks, which will also prevent authentic passports from being misused by unauthorized persons who happen to look like the person in the passport photo."

The magazine is calling on readers to collect the prints of other German officials, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, Bavarian Prime Minister Guenther Beckstein and BKA President Joerg Ziercke.

This is one way to kill an invasive and pointless technology in its tracks.

Source: The Register

Balmy
Saturn's moon Enceladus is both warmer and more organic than previously thought.

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Cassini spacecraft tasted and sampled a surprising organic brew erupting in geyser-like fashion from Saturn's moon Enceladus during a close flyby on March 12. Scientists are amazed that this tiny moon is so active, "hot" and brimming with water vapor and organic chemicals.

New heat maps of the surface show higher temperatures than previously known in the south polar region, with hot tracks running the length of giant fissures. Additionally, scientists say the organics "taste and smell" like some of those found in a comet. The jets themselves harmlessly peppered Cassini, exerting measurable torque on the spacecraft, and providing an indirect measure of the plume density.

"A completely unexpected surprise is that the chemistry of Enceladus, what's coming out from inside, resembles that of a comet," said Hunter Waite, principal investigator for the Cassini Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "To have primordial material coming out from inside a Saturn moon raises many questions on the formation of the Saturn system."

"Enceladus is by no means a comet. Comets have tails and orbit the sun, and Enceladus' activity is powered by internal heat while comet activity is powered by sunlight. Enceladus' brew is like carbonated water with an essence of natural gas," said Waite.

The Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer saw a much higher density of volatile gases, water vapor, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, as well as organic materials, some 20 times denser than expected. This dramatic increase in density was evident as the spacecraft flew over the area of the plumes.

New high-resolution heat maps of the south pole by Cassini's Composite Infrared Spectrometer show that the so-called tiger stripes, giant fissures that are the source of the geysers, are warm along almost their entire lengths, and reveal other warm fissures nearby. These more precise new measurements reveal temperatures of at least minus 93 degrees Celsius (minus 135 Fahrenheit.) That is 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than previously seen and 93 degrees Celsius (200 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than other regions of the moon. The warmest regions along the tiger stripes correspond to two of the jet locations seen in Cassini images.

Yeah, it's really hot down there, hehe.

Seriously though, yet more cool science being done by robots while people putter around a floating tin can in low earth orbit playing with (admittedly cool) giant killer robot arms.

Let's send the robots out further afield, I say, to do our work for us and avoid the whole 'hugs of death' thing.

Source: NASA

Talkie

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. audio historians have discovered and played back a French inventor's historic 1860 recording of a folk song -- the oldest-known audio recording -- made 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.

"It's magic," audio historian David Giovannoni said on Thursday. "It's like a ghost singing to you."

Lasting 10 seconds, the recording is of a person singing "Au clair de la lune, Pierrot repondit" ("By the light of the moon, Pierrot replied") -- part of a French song, according to First Sounds, a group of audio historians, recording engineers, sound archivists and others dedicated to preserving humankind's earliest sound recordings.

It was made on April 9, 1860, by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on a device called the phonautograph that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp, Giovannoni said.

Giovannoni said he learned on March 1 of its existence in an archive in Paris and traveled to the French capital a week later. Experts working with the First Sounds group then transformed the paper tracings into sound.

This Scott guy was trying to create, essentially, a really early oscilloscope. He didn't intend it to be played back. But the technology used to, in essence, scan early recordings like wax cylinders and so forth was used on this, to convert its record of sound waves back into audible sound. Mythbusters did the same thing with clay recordings to test a myth about ancient pottery.

Neat stuff.

Source: Reuters
Researchers
Actual Sound

DELICIOUS
Fish are being trained that will catch themselves to be turned into delicious fish nibblers.

BOSTON - Call them Pavlov's fish: Scientists are testing a plan to train fish to catch themselves by swimming into a net when they hear a tone that signals feeding time.

If it works, the system could eventually allow black sea bass to be released into the open ocean, where they would grow to market size, then swim into an underwater cage to be harvested when they hear the signal.

What's next, teaching them to coat themselves in batter and hop inside a fryer?

"It sounds crazy, but it's real," said Simon Miner, a research assistant at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Wood's Hole, which received a $270,000 grant for the project from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Miner said the specially trained fish could someday be used to bolster the depleted black sea bass stock. Farmed fish might become better acclimated to the wild if they can be called back for food every few days.

...

Miner said the first objective was to see if the fish could truly be trained. He got his answer after keeping the fish in a circular tank, then sounding a tone before he dropped food in an enclosed "feeding zone" within the tank that the fish could enter only through a small opening.

Researchers played the tone for 20 seconds, three times a day, for about two weeks. Afterward, whenever the tone sounded, "you have remote-control fish," Miner said.

"You hit that button, and they go into that area, and they wait patiently," he said.

Miner is now trying to figure out how long the fish remember to associate the tone with food. He feeds the fish outside the feeding zone without a tone for a few days and then tests if they will still head for the feeding area when the tone sounds again.

Some fish forgot after five days. Others remembered as long as 10. Miner said the strength of memory seems tied to how long the fish are trained.

Remote controlled fish!

Source: AZ Central

Smelly
Whacky Mad Science.

Know how a whiff of certain odors can take you back in time, either to a great memory or bad one? It turns out emotion plays an even bigger role with the nose, and that your sense of smell actually can sharpen when something bad happens.

...

Could an emotionally charged situation make that initial cue be perceived more strongly in the first place?

The research team recruited 12 healthy young adults to find out.

Volunteers repeatedly smelled sets of laboratory chemicals with odors distinctly different from ones in everyday life. An "oily grassy" smell is the best description that lead researcher Wen Li, a Northwestern postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience, could give.

Two of the bottles in a set contained the same substance and the third had a mirror image of it, meaning its odor normally would be indistinguishable. By chance, the volunteers correctly guessed the odd odor about one-third of the time.

Then Li gave the volunteers mild electric shocks while they smelled just the odd chemical. In later smell tests, they could correctly pick out the odd odor 70 percent of the time.

MRI scans showed the improvement was more than coincidence. There were changes in how the brain's main olfactory region stored the odor information, essentially better imprinting the shock-linked scent so it could be distinguished more quickly from a similar odor.

In other words, the brain seems to have a mechanism to sniff out threats.

ZZZERT

Ahh, to volunteer to be shocked for science. Noble.

Or more likely, they did it for beer money.

Source: Time Magazine