Browser Cleanup and Work-Ahead

Stories to Pique the Interest and Cleanse the Palate

OK, some of them are just weird.

Free Prostitutes!
No, seriously.

If you want to watch Nick having sex with a prostitute, he's happy to let you.

The 36-year-old bank-security technician drove eight hours from his home in Metz, France, to Big Sister, a Prague brothel where customers peruse a touch-screen menu of blondes, brunettes and redheads available for free. The catch is clients have to let their exploits be filmed and posted on the Internet.

Doing your part for Praque tourism, eh, ladies?

Source: AZCentral (probably a Nidoking link originally)

California Scheming
So California is considering mandating the installation, in new homes, of thermostats they can remote control to turn down your AC during peak useage, ostensibly to prevent blackouts.

Without your consent.

On the one hand, yeah, it's better than a blackout; but who decides who gets to roast, and how? What about people who need the cool? The sick, the elderly, or just a poor schmoe who works nights and desperately needs his sleep?

The potential for abuse is ENORMOUS.

Look folks; you live in one of the sunniest states in the nation. It's called Solar Power. It just so happens to produce energy best at times when you want to use your AC most.

Look into it.

Source: International Herald Tribune

Pundit Class Perpetually Wrong
Jon Stewart ripped into the pundit class on their New Hampshire predictions, and subsequent near-meltdown, on an episode of The...err, A Daily Show that I missed (the name has been changed for the strike, I dunno why).

There's a video of the skit but I'm waiting to watch it with the roomie.

Source: Raw Story

Atrocious Headline
This is a story about how apparently some sugar free gums are made with sorbitol, a sugar subsitute... that is also a laxative.

Who thought that would be a good idea? MORONS!

But the headline takes the cake here.

On the run: Chewing gum blamed for chronic diarrhoea

What the hell is that? That's not even remotely funny.

Of course, neither is this.

In an unusual case study reported by next Saturday's British Medical Journal (BMJ), gastro-entorologists at Berlin's Charite hospital describe how they investigated two patients who had persistent diarrhoea.

One was a 21-year-old woman who had been experiencing diarrhoea and diffuse abdominal pain for eight months and had lost 11 kilos (24.2 pounds) of her 51.8-kilo (114-pound) body weight.

The other was a 46-year-old man with flatulence, abdominal bloating and diarrhoea so bad that he had lost 22 kilos (48 pounds), or a fifth of his body weight, over the past year.

Once again, I ask: What idiot thought this was a good idea? The headline OR the damn gum?

Source: Raw Story

Promising Research
So there's some promising AIDS research out now, in part due to the Human Genone Project. Basically now that we have the genome mapped, researchers can produce little snippets of RNA to selectively turn off any individual gene and see what happens.

Some researchers working on AIDS did this with all 21,000 genes that the human body uses to code for protein, to see which of them the virus needed to work. They found a couple hundred nobody knew it used, that we could mess with to fight the disease.

This is outstanding, and proof that science is awesome.

Source: The Washington Post

Narrow Escapes

We Missed a Bullet Here

Not By a Lot, Though

I blogged a little this week about the revelation that we were lied into the Vietnam War, as the official reports on communications at the time prove, without a doubt, that there was in fact no attack upon American ships, and in turn, that the entire Gulf of Tonkin justification was a shame.

See here.

But it seems that history has a bad habit of repeating itself, or at least, that warmongers aren't terribly creative. This week, our own idiot in chief, Bush, tried to stage his own Gulf of Tonkin. Only something went wrong; or from the perspective of those of us who don't want to see yet another bloody, pointless conflict, something went *right*.

It began with a bizarre story from the Pentagon; Iran sent speedboats to drop mysterious white boxes in front of powerful US naval assets, then sent them a radio call, in unaccented English, threatening to make them 'explode'

The Pentagon's initial account of the Jan. 6 confrontation said the Iranian boats "charged" the US ships, dropped boxes in the water that were thought to be mines and threatened to set up "explosions." An unnamed US Defense Department official told the Associated Press the day after the incident that it was "the most serious provocation of its sort" in the Gulf, although Iranian officials tried to downplay the incident as a simple misunderstanding.

The US released a recording of this 'threat', and immediately, however, suspicions began to be raised by people who, err, knew what they were talking about.

Any Iranian can immediately identify Persian-accented English, particularly if the speaker has had little contact with the West, as is the case with Revolutionary Guardsmen and sailors. Iranians, you see, have difficulty with two consonants such as "p" and "l" next to each other; even Iranians who have lived in America for years will often pronounce "please" as "peh-leeze", or in this case, "explode" as "exp-eh-lode". On the tape, "explode" is pronounced perfectly, albeit as if the speaker was a villain addressing a superhero. Further, it is unimaginable, given what is known about the Revolutionary Guards (and I have met many), that one of its corps would speak in a such a manner, even if the accent were correctly Persian.

That's from Iranian expert Hooman Majd, who has, amongst other things, served as a translator to two Iranian Presidents on their US trips.

So he might, might, just know what he's talking about.
(Source: Huffington Post)

But this is the video age, and audio just won't do. So the US released a tape.

Of course, this IS the video age, so the Iranians had one too. The funny thing... the tapes don't match. Even the US tape doesn't show the actions we'd described, in particular, no funny white boxes.

And then the backpedaling began.

It was not until Thursday, after the Pentagon and Iran had each released videos of the encounter, that the US acknowledged the verbal threats they had associated with the Iranian speedboats from day one could have been broadcast from virtually anywhere.

Well, that's good. Now we've got a complete pantsdowner. Again. Nice job, Bush.

The consequences? We all look like tools. Again. But for now, we avoid war.

Barely.

Aftergood said the information should have been more fully vetted before the White House began warning Iran of "serious consequences" of future showdowns.

"What you hear talking is the child on the schoolyard, not the sober national leader," he said. "And i don't think that serves anyone's interest."

Well put sir. Well put indeed.

Source: Raw Story

El Presidente Roundup

America Likes the Boomy-Boomy

The Bush Administration's Approach to Governance Involves High Explosives and Very Few Questions

Bush Says We Should Have Bombed Auschwitz
Rice does a good job spinning it though.

Bush: US should have bombed Auschwitz

Bush Visits Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial; Says US Should Have Bombed Auschwitz

...

"We should have bombed it," Bush said, according to Shalev.

...

"We were talking about the often-discussed 'Could the United States have done more by bombing the train tracks?'" Rice told reporters later aboard Air Force One. "And so we were just talking about the various explanations that had been given about why that might not have been done."

Yes, I'm sure that Bush was really into those wonky, difficult moral policy questions from over half a century ago. Then he wrote a thesis on high energy particle physics before putting in a couple of hours experimentation on neurobiology.

Riiiight.

I admit, I skimmed the headline and didn't go down to Rice's explanation at first, which makes it sound a lot better, but do you believe her? This is the same White House that claims Chimpy is a genius who reads several books a day. You've seen the man; do you believe that?

Of course not.

As to whether the US should have bombed the train tracks leading to the death camps, that's a much harder dilemma. Would it have helped? Or would the Nazis have shrugged their shoulders and just shot the Jews wherever they were currently stuck, and the war ground on a bit longer without that aerial support hitting their cities and industry?

Ending the war ended the Holocaust. Anything else would have only slowed it. I'm not sure you can condemn either course of action... it's not like we can turn back time and try out alternate scenarios.

Personally I think Bush meant it literally; he thinks that you can save anyone, liberate anyone, by blowing the crap out of them. He has a fundamental misunderstanding of how bombs work; he thinks they give off magical freedom rays and candy, not fire, shrapnel and concussive death.

Idiot.

Source: Raw Story

IU Student Finds TSA Website Screws You Twice
So the TSA set up a website to protest your being on the no-fly list.

They set this site up in a highly insecure fashion, so you could phish the names of the people who wanted off the list to abuse however you saw fit.

Coincidence? Or pouring salt in the wounds of people they already didn't like?

Perhaps just usual Bush corruption:

The report, posted Friday on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's Web site, also found that TSA awarded a no-bid contract to a small Virginia-based company to run the program.

Investigators found one of the senior program managers at TSA who oversaw the launch of the redress site is a former employee of Desyne Web Services — the company that received the $48,816 contract to develop the site and continues to do business with TSA today. The employee is also a high school friend of the company's owner, according to the report.

Wow, nobody could have forseen that going badly.

A graduate student in Indiana discovered the site's security vulnerabilities last February while researching a paper on boarding pass security. Chris Soghoian — who is getting his doctorate in information security at Indiana University — noticed that the redress site was not secure, yet it asked for names, Social Security numbers and birth dates. Soghoian said when he sees a site like this "alarm bells go off in my head."

Good on you, Chris.

Source: Raw Story

Oh, Is That All?
Bush says we could be in Iraq 'easily' another ten years.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush said on Friday the United States would have a long-term presence in Iraq that could "easily" last a decade, but that it would be at the invitation of the Iraqi government.

Source: Reuters (duh)

Jimmy Carter Responds
Courtesy of The Onion.