Wastes of Human Skin Around the World

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

Institutional Failures

Bush Politics
(I shouldn't do this, but for the squeamish, there's a bit of graphic detail on the tortures done by our allies in this article.

It's sort of our responsibility to at least acknowledge the horrible stuff we do, but I'll bow to tender sensibilities this once and issue a warning.)

Vanity Fair has a great article up about how Bush's mishandling of the Palestinian situation led to an election that wasn't in our national interest, a civil war our appointed faction couldn't win, and the complete collapse of the Palestinian state, including a terrible humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

The Al Deira Hotel, in Gaza City, is a haven of calm in a land beset by poverty, fear, and violence. In the middle of December 2007, I sit in the hotel’s airy restaurant, its windows open to the Mediterranean, and listen to a slight, bearded man named Mazen Asad abu Dan describe the suffering he endured 11 months before at the hands of his fellow Palestinians. Abu Dan, 28, is a member of Hamas, the Iranian-backed Islamist organization that has been designated a terrorist group by the United States, but I have a good reason for taking him at his word: I’ve seen the video.

It shows abu Dan kneeling, his hands bound behind his back, and screaming as his captors pummel him with a black iron rod. “I lost all the skin on my back from the beatings,” he says. “Instead of medicine, they poured perfume on my wounds. It felt as if they had taken a sword to my injuries.”

On January 26, 2007, abu Dan, a student at the Islamic University of Gaza, had gone to a local cemetery with his father and five others to erect a headstone for his grandmother. When they arrived, however, they found themselves surrounded by 30 armed men from Hamas’s rival, Fatah, the party of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. “They took us to a house in north Gaza,” abu Dan says. “They covered our eyes and took us to a room on the sixth floor.”

The video reveals a bare room with white walls and a black-and-white tiled floor, where abu Dan’s father is forced to sit and listen to his son’s shrieks of pain. Afterward, abu Dan says, he and two of the others were driven to a market square. “They told us they were going to kill us. They made us sit on the ground.” He rolls up the legs of his trousers to display the circular scars that are evidence of what happened next: “They shot our knees and feet—five bullets each. I spent four months in a wheelchair.”

Abu Dan had no way of knowing it, but his tormentors had a secret ally: the administration of President George W. Bush.

First up, we decided to force the Fatah party government of Palestine to hold elections... for some reason that's hard to fathom.

In a speech in the White House Rose Garden on June 24, 2002, President Bush announced that American policy in the Middle East was turning in a fundamentally new direction.

Arafat was still in power at the time, and many in the U.S. and Israel blamed him for wrecking Clinton’s micro-managed peace efforts by launching the second intifada—a renewed revolt, begun in 2000, in which more than 1,000 Israelis and 4,500 Palestinians had died. Bush said he wanted to give Palestinians the chance to choose new leaders, ones who were not “compromised by terror.” In place of Arafat’s all-powerful presidency, Bush said, “the Palestinian parliament should have the full authority of a legislative body.”

Arafat died in November 2004, and Abbas, his replacement as Fatah leader, was elected president in January 2005. Elections for the Palestinian parliament, known officially as the Legislative Council, were originally set for July 2005, but later postponed by Abbas until January 2006.

Dahlan says he warned his friends in the Bush administration that Fatah still wasn’t ready for elections in January. Decades of self-preservationist rule by Arafat had turned the party into a symbol of corruption and inefficiency—a perception Hamas found it easy to exploit. Splits within Fatah weakened its position further: in many places, a single Hamas candidate ran against several from Fatah.

“Everyone was against the elections,” Dahlan says. Everyone except Bush. “Bush decided, ‘I need an election. I want elections in the Palestinian Authority.’ Everyone is following him in the American administration, and everyone is nagging Abbas, telling him, ‘The president wants elections.’ Fine. For what purpose?”

The elections went forward as scheduled. On January 25, Hamas won 56 percent of the seats in the Legislative Council.

Few inside the U.S. administration had predicted the result, and there was no contingency plan to deal with it. “I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming,” Condoleezza Rice told reporters. “I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing.”

“Everyone blamed everyone else,” says an official with the Department of Defense. “We sat there in the Pentagon and said, ‘Who the fuck recommended this?’ ”

Since that went so well, we pushed for a known, err, torturer and strongman, hated by his rather long list of victims, to take control when Abbas, the Palestinian President, didn't move fast enough to crush his elected rivals. This was an interesting decision.

Weeks passed with no sign that Abbas was ready to do America’s bidding. Finally, another official was sent to Ramallah. Jake Walles, the consul general in Jerusalem, is a career foreign-service officer with many years’ experience in the Middle East. His purpose was to deliver a barely varnished ultimatum to the Palestinian president.

We know what Walles said because a copy was left behind, apparently by accident, of the “talking points” memo prepared for him by the State Department. The document has been authenticated by U.S. and Palestinian officials.

The memo left no doubt as to what kind of action the U.S. was seeking: “Hamas should be given a clear choice, with a clear deadline: … they either accept a new government that meets the Quartet principles, or they reject it The consequences of Hamas’ decision should also be clear: If Hamas does not agree within the prescribed time, you should make clear your intention to declare a state of emergency and form an emergency government explicitly committed to that platform.”

Walles and Abbas both knew what to expect from Hamas if these instructions were followed: rebellion and bloodshed. For that reason, the memo states, the U.S. was already working to strengthen Fatah’s security forces. “If you act along these lines, we will support you both materially and politically,” the script said. “We will be there to support you.”

Abbas was also encouraged to “strengthen [his] team” to include “credible figures of strong standing in the international community.” Among those the U.S. wanted brought in, says an official who knew of the policy, was Muhammad Dahlan.

Dahlan's forces quickly moved to institute a reign of terror including what sounds like fairly ritualistic maiming with guns.

Fatah’s vulnerability was a source of grave concern to Dahlan. “I made a lot of activities to give Hamas the impression that we were still strong and we had the capacity to face them,” he says. “But I knew in my heart it wasn’t true.” He had no official security position at the time, but he belonged to parliament and retained the loyalty of Fatah members in Gaza. “I used my image, my power.” Dahlan says he told Abbas that “Gaza needs only a decision for Hamas to take over.” To prevent that from happening, Dahlan waged “very clever warfare” for many months.

According to several alleged victims, one of the tactics this “warfare” entailed was to kidnap and torture members of Hamas’s Executive Force. (Dahlan denies Fatah used such tactics, but admits “mistakes” were made.) Abdul Karim al-Jasser, a strapping man of 25, says he was the first such victim. “It was on October 16, still Ramadan,” he says. “I was on my way to my sister’s house for iftar. Four guys stopped me, two of them with guns. They forced me to accompany them to the home of Aman abu Jidyan,” a Fatah leader close to Dahlan. (Abu Jidyan would be killed in the June uprising.)

The first phase of torture was straightforward enough, al-Jasser says: he was stripped naked, bound, blindfolded, and beaten with wooden poles and plastic pipes. “They put a piece of cloth in my mouth to stop me screaming.” His interrogators forced him to answer contradictory accusations: one minute they said that he had collaborated with Israel, the next that he had fired Qassam rockets against it.

But the worst was yet to come. “They brought an iron bar,” al-Jasser says, his voice suddenly hesitant. We are speaking inside his home in Gaza, which is experiencing one of its frequent power outages. He points to the propane-gas lamp that lights the room. “They put the bar in the flame of a lamp like this. When it was red, they took the covering off my eyes. Then they pressed it against my skin. That was the last thing I remember.”

When he came to, he was still in the room where he had been tortured. A few hours later, the Fatah men handed him over to Hamas, and he was taken to the hospital. “I could see the shock in the eyes of the doctors who entered the room,” he says. He shows me photos of purple third-degree burns wrapped like towels around his thighs and much of his lower torso. “The doctors told me that if I had been thin, not chubby, I would have died. But I wasn’t alone. That same night that I was released, abu Jidyan’s men fired five bullets into the legs of one of my relatives. We were in the same ward in the hospital.”

I honestly do wonder what's with the five bullets thing. Seems like some sort of numerical fetish.

Finally, we took a rather dubious series of steps to try and stage a coup against the legitimately elected, if, you know, terrorist, Palestinian government.

A State Department official adds, “Those in charge of implementing the policy were saying, ‘Do whatever it takes. We have to be in a position for Fatah to defeat Hamas militarily, and only Muhammad Dahlan has the guile and the muscle to do this.’ The expectation was that this was where it would end up—with a military showdown.” There were, this official says, two “parallel programs”—the overt one, which the administration took to Congress, “and a covert one, not only to buy arms but to pay the salaries of security personnel.”

In essence, the program was simple. According to State Department officials, beginning in the latter part of 2006, Rice initiated several rounds of phone calls and personal meetings with leaders of four Arab nations—Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. She asked them to bolster Fatah by providing military training and by pledging funds to buy its forces lethal weapons. The money was to be paid directly into accounts controlled by President Abbas.

The scheme bore some resemblance to the Iran-contra scandal, in which members of Ronald Reagan’s administration sold arms to Iran, an enemy of the U.S. The money was used to fund the contra rebels in Nicaragua, in violation of a congressional ban. Some of the money for the contras, like that for Fatah, was furnished by Arab allies as a result of U.S. lobbying.

...

Legal or not, arms shipments soon began to take place. In late December 2006, four Egyptian trucks passed through an Israeli-controlled crossing into Gaza, where their contents were handed over to Fatah. These included 2,000 Egyptian-made automatic rifles, 20,000 ammunition clips, and two million bullets. News of the shipment leaked, and Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, an Israeli Cabinet member, said on Israeli radio that the guns and ammunition would give Abbas “the ability to cope with those organizations which are trying to ruin everything”—namely, Hamas.

Avi Dichter points out that all weapons shipments had to be approved by Israel, which was understandably hesitant to allow state-of-the-art arms into Gaza. “One thing’s for sure, we weren’t talking about heavy weapons,” says a State Department official. “It was small arms, light machine guns, ammunition.”

Of course, when things went south, we upped the ante yet again.

The Bush administration’s goals for Plan B were elaborated in a document titled “An Action Plan for the Palestinian Presidency.” This action plan went through several drafts and was developed by the U.S., the Palestinians, and the government of Jordan. Sources agree, however, that it originated in the State Department.

The early drafts stressed the need for bolstering Fatah’s forces in order to “deter” Hamas. The “desired outcome” was to give Abbas “the capability to take the required strategic political decisions … such as dismissing the cabinet, establishing an emergency cabinet.”

The drafts called for increasing the “level and capacity” of 15,000 of Fatah’s existing security personnel while adding 4,700 troops in seven new “highly trained battalions on strong policing.” The plan also promised to arrange “specialized training abroad,” in Jordan and Egypt, and pledged to “provide the security personnel with the necessary equipment and arms to carry out their missions.”

A detailed budget put the total cost for salaries, training, and “the needed security equipment, lethal and non-lethal,” at $1.27 billion over five years. The plan states: “The costs and overall budget were developed jointly with General Dayton’s team and the Palestinian technical team for reform”—a unit established by Dahlan and led by his friend and policy aide Bassil Jaber. Jaber confirms that the document is an accurate summary of the work he and his colleagues did with Dayton. “The plan was to create a security establishment that could protect and strengthen a peaceful Palestinian state living side by side with Israel,” he says.

The final draft of the Action Plan was drawn up in Ramallah by officials of the Palestinian Authority. This version was identical to the earlier drafts in all meaningful ways but one: it presented the plan as if it had been the Palestinians’ idea. It also said the security proposals had been “approved by President Mahmoud Abbas after being discussed and agreed [to] by General Dayton’s team.”

On April 30, 2007, a portion of one early draft was leaked to a Jordanian newspaper, Al-Majd. The secret was out. From Hamas’s perspective, the Action Plan could amount to only one thing: a blueprint for a U.S.-backed Fatah coup.

...

In mid-May, with Dahlan still absent, a new element was added to Gaza’s toxic mix when 500 Fatah National Security Forces recruits arrived, fresh from training in Egypt and equipped with new weapons and vehicles. “They had been on a crash course for 45 days,” Dahlan says. “The idea was that we needed them to go in dressed well, equipped well, and that might create the impression of new authority.” Their presence was immediately noticed, not only by Hamas but by staff from Western aid agencies. “They had new rifles with telescopic sights, and they were wearing black flak jackets,” says a frequent visitor from Northern Europe. “They were quite a contrast to the usual scruffy lot.”

...

On June 7, there was another damaging leak, when the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Abbas and Dayton had asked Israel to authorize the biggest Egyptian arms shipment yet—to include dozens of armored cars, hundreds of armor-piercing rockets, thousands of hand grenades, and millions of rounds of ammunition. A few days later, just before the next batch of Fatah recruits was due to leave for training in Egypt, the coup began in earnest.

So how long did our puppet coup government last?

Five days.

FIVE DAYS.

Ahh, Bush. Such a great strategeric leader.

Read the full article for a great picture of the ego and idiocy of the neoconservatives, especially a very petulant, petty, small-minded Condi Rice, who seems to have been determined to put five rounds of her own in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Fascinating, and horrible, stuff.

Source: Vanity Fair

(The title of this post comes from a quote by John Bolton, who says something about this fiasco representing an institutional failure in the article. If Bolton, who thinks nuking Iran is a swell idea, is smart enough to see the flaws in your plan, you're cooked, seriously.

Israel, Again

Still Not Our Ally

So it seems that the Israeli government has decided that genocide, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

GAZA (Reuters) - A year-old Palestinian girl and a senior Hamas bombmaker were killed in the Gaza Strip on Friday as Israel pressed home air strikes after a senior official warned Gazans they risked a "shoah" if rocket fire did not stop.

...

Israel's deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai told Army Radio: "The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger 'shoah' because we will use all our might to defend ourselves."

The word "shoah" is rarely used in Israel beyond discussions of the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews but government spokesmen said Vilnai had employed the word only to mean "disaster".

Sure he did.

With friends like these...

Source: Reuters

Israel

Asian Eateries and Fascism

I officially never want to hear that Israel is a 'democracy', or the natural 'ally' of the United States, again.

Ok? Just stop it. You're embarassing yourself.

The country is an official theocracy, with special rules and status for Jews and those of Jewish descent, a brutal apartheid against the Palestinians, an aggressive and paranoid military complex ruling the country in conjunction with religious elites, etc. There is no way you can reasonably look at Israel and not conclude that it is a fascist nation, and I thought that World War II established once and for all that fascists are NOT our friends. Still, people persist, and fail to see the problems that stem from our strongest 'ally' in the Middle East being a theocratic, fascist police-state.

The problems still exist though.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel's Asian restaurants went on a one-day spring roll strike on Tuesday in protest over government plans to rid kitchens of foreign chefs, and said sushi and noodles would be the next items off the menu.

The restaurants are angry at government plans to purge Japanese, Chinese and Thai eateries of Asian cooks and replace them with Israelis as part of a broader programme to cut the number of foreigners working in the Jewish state.

Purge is an appropriate term; they're trying to get rid of these people, legal immigrants, some of them having lived in Israel for decades, solely because they can then hand their jobs to Israelis. They won't let these people BECOME Israelis because their skin's the wrong color and they worship the wrong god.

Israel attracts virtually no immigrants from Asia since anyone seeking citizenship here must prove they have Jewish family or links to the country.

Seeking to plug a gap in the labour market during the first Palestinian uprising, Israel allowed foreigners to work in the Jewish state. But now it is trying to limit those numbers to create more jobs for Israelis.

This year the government is granting 500 permits to Asian chefs compared with 900 last year. Next year no permits will be issued, although restaurants willing to pay twice the average national salary will be allowed to employ chefs as "experts".

The government argues Israelis can be trained.

"Everyone can make Chinese food it's not impossible to learn," said Shoshana Strauss, a lawyer working on foreign worker issues for the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor.

Hey, Strauss? Fuck you, you insensitive asshole.

Job training isn't the point here, dipshit. The point is that you've made an entire class of people into second-class citizens and are trying to deport them, after firing them from their jobs, because of their RACE AND RELIGION.

To quote the great Keith Olbermann, 'You're a FASCIST! You should have a t-shirt printed that says FASCIST on it!'

Never, ever tell me that Israel is just like the United States, that as a government or on a national level they share our values. They do NOT. They are the last bastion of fascism in the world today, an enemy we thought we had beaten back decades ago, but which got a new lease on life, ironically from the very refugees who had seen its terrible power first hand, and decided, for whatever reason, that they should have that power for themselves. What a Faustian bargain that turned out to be.

Source: Reuters

Randomness Randomized

Very Random

Post-It Project
A comic blog with a twist; this one features comics drawn on post-it notes. Tiny art!

Source: The Post-It Project

Ogier the Dane
Here he sleeps, the greatest Danish king, until the day Denmark needs his help once more.

Huh. You'd think World War II would have qualified for the Sleeping King Myth, but we didn't see Ogier, or Arthur for that matter. Gee, if something worse is coming up and they're sleeping in for that, it's going to be ugly.

Source: Wikipedia

B.Cthulhu
So B.C. ran a strip recently with the last panel blank, joking that they'd be dropped for a decidedly apolitical political joke.

This was taken up as a blank canvas, with the following glorious result.

Scientology
Scientology has been making itself an ever more ridiculous name of late. Their best nonsense has to be the stuff about how they can grant you superpowers if you submit to enough brainwashing and spend enough money.

The thing is, their superpowers are a bit bizarre. I'm not sure why you'd want some of these at all.

The Ferengi Tax System
Toward the very end of Deep Space Nine, the Ferengi undergo dramatic social reforms, including institution of a dreaded program of... taxation.

Naturally, however, bribes were tax-deductible.

As opposed to the real world, or at least Israel.

ome companies request tax deductions for philanthropy, others for restaurants bills. But one Israeli business tried to push the envelope by asking to deduct nearly $860,000 it paid in kickbacks.



A Tel Aviv district court rejected the petition on Feb. 8.

The business, whose name was withheld by the court, asked to deduct the sum for kickbacks that were paid to help spur a business deal. The Israeli daily Maariv reported that the deal took place in an unidentified African nation. The company alleged the kickback was necessary as a part of the local business custom and therefore should be exempted from the Israeli law.

This didn't go over very well, needless to say.

Source: Raw Story

Star Wars Movie
Another new Star Wars movie, this one animated and a sequel to the fantastic Clone Wars cartoon.

Man I hope they don't screw it up.

Source: The Register

Sci-Tech News

Because Until We Have Giant Robots, Life Just Isn't Worthwhile

Insert 'Joystick' Humor Here
So the Israeli air force has found that a commonly prescribed medication has the unintentional benefit of easing the stress on the lungs caused by high-altitude, low-oxygen flight.

The medication? Viagra.

A recent study conducted by Israeli doctors among mountain climbers in Africa found a link between erectile dysfunction drugs and improved performance in high altitudes, the mass-selling Yediot Aharonot reported on Thursday.

The active ingredient in the drugs was found to make climbers perform better in an environment with less oxygen, which causes fatigue and dizziness.

This has led army doctors to consider giving jet fighter pilots -- who can fly at altitudes of up to 50,000 feet (15,000 metres) -- the same drug, the report said.

"The Viagra family of drugs is considered effective in these conditions because when there is a long shortage in oxygen it leads to high blood pressure in the lungs, and the drugs help fight that," the report quoted military medical sources as saying.

Make up your own immature jokes. Though I do wonder if they can manage the primary intended effect of these drugs with dosing changes, or if pilots will just have to put up with the.. distraction.

Hey, astronauts have to wear diapers. Sometimes the bleeding edge of technology is personally embarassing.

Source: Raw Story

Under the Sea
So progress is being made repairing some of the rash of cables that went out mysteriously last week or so.

No word on why they got cut/slashed/whatever though.

I'm betting it's Dagon.

Source: Reuters

Polaroid Out of Instant Film Business
Headline pretty much says it all -- Polaroid is closing down their instant film business line.

Which leaves them more or less as a brand-name outfit, i.e., they sell their name to unrelated products, like tvs and digi-cams, as a marketing ploy. Much like Atari in the 90s.

Interesting fact: they apparently made commercial versions of that instant film stuff. I had no idea.

Source: The Register

Astro Blog
Apparently this is a good audio-blog for astronomy topics.. I'll have to check it out sometime.

Source: Astronomy Cast

Seven League Boots
I read up on the myth of the Seven League Boots the other day (common Euro-folktale about boots that let you take 21-mile long strides), and that got me to remembering a story I'd seen about mechanical boots some Russkie engineer had designed to let you walk really fast.

Thus, I found this article.

UFA, Russia — Being a star engineering student at the top-notch science university here wasn’t enough to exempt Viktor K. Gordeyev from his physical education class.

Mr. Gordeyev, a specialist in airplane piston engines, sweated it out with everyone else, running laps in lumbering heavy boots in this town in the foothills of the Ural Mountains.

He vowed to find an easier way. Eventually, he found one — or at least came close. Mr. Gordeyev invented a gasoline-powered boot that looks like pogo sticks that strap to your shins, and they work on the same principle as the air-cushioned basketball shoe.

But rather than being dismissed as a crackpot invention, his boots — which use tiny pistons — became classified as a Russian military secret until 1994.

Ironically, his boots have the same drawback the boots in the myth did -- they're too physically exhausting.

One result of the Russian space agency testing was a calculation that the energy in calories used to move the two-pound boot at a run would exceed the energy input from the gasoline engine. That meant, it was more tiring to run with the motorized footwear than without it, undermining the original rationale.

Only if the weight could be reduced to below 2 pounds per boot would the wearer have a net energy gain. So far they have failed at this.

Of course, the average human can't run, at all, at 21 mph for any sustained amount of time (that being the top test speed of said boots... apparently it's pretty reliable to run at 10-12 for average peoples, which is still impressive). I wonder if the soviets examined this aspect.. trading off a bit of energy for the option of having a really high speed dash.

Silly Soviets. Just because a technology is monstrously impractical, that doesn't mean it can't be fun!

Source: The Herald Tribue

Polling Science
Interesting comparison of the reliability of various pollsters in this primary season.

I need to take a look at the analysis of the method they used later though. I know some of the results are relatively accurate; Zogby has just sucked this year, because they've been badly weighing various demographics... in SoCal they vastly underestimated the Latino vote and overestimated the Black vote, for example.

Source: Firedoglake

Dragonball Tech (Capsule Corporation Gone Wild)
Sadly, these devices don't fit into magical capsules that can be stuffed into a pocket until needed. But they're still pretty cool for cheap toys. By cool I mean 'possess the potential to be incredibly irritating and fun at the same time'.

On February 8, Bandai announced Dragonball Items Neo, four gadgets with electronic lights and sounds inspired by Akira Toriyama's Dragonball fighting manga and anime. Bandai notified retailers of this series last month, but did not publicly describe the details of each item until this past Friday. The items will be released in Japan at the end of February for 525 yen (about US$4.90) each, including one lemon-soda-flavored candy.

The series includes two wristbands that will automatically "shout" attack calls in Son Goku's voice when the user makes the appropriate hand gestures. For example, the Son Goku Voice Band (Kamehameha ver.) will utter "KA—ME—HA—ME—" when the user presses his or her wrists together while forming the chi energy blast. The Son Goku Voice Band (Genki Dama ver.) will shout "Minna no genki o ora ni wakete kure!" when the user raises his or her hands up in the air to form the sphere of the worlds' life energy.

Man, imagine if you had to shout the full descriptive name of an attack before you used it in real life.

"M-16A2 5.56x45mm NATO Rifle Attack!!"

There's also a replica of the Scouters used in the show that fits over one eye and apparently displays stats on a couple of characters. This is bound to lead to a lot of kids hilariously running into doorframes.

Sources: Anime News Network
Wikipedia (M-16 NATO) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M16_rifle#NATO_standardization

Gamer Girls
So there's something of an uproar over this free mini-mag Nintendo is giving away in the UK, called Girl Gamer. The front cover hits the trifecta of girl stereotypes, involving lots of pink, cooking games and a baby simulator.

Really.

On the other hand, as noted, this was bundled with a preteen magazine... so the audience were already braindead to start with, and big words would have turned them off.

Still, food for thought, on why you'd choose to advertise there in the first place. I mean, sure, you can make a lot of money marketing offensive crap (see Ron Paul for details), and if you are selling to idiots, you might have to, in fact, sell idiotic stuff (again, Ron Paul, newsletter)... but that only flies so long as you accept the proposition of getting into bed with morons for cash (Ron Paul.. no wait, I'll refrain from that joke).

VGCats did an amusing take on this idea as well.

Source: DSFanboy.com

All Time Biggest Flop
Sure, it may have earned this title by a technicality where the producers exploit a SAG loophole to show a movie domestically so they can pay the cast less. So what? It's still an amusing record.

Budget for Zyzzyx Road? 1.2 million dollars. Box Office Gross? 30 dollars.

Hilarious.

Source: Wikipedia
(Note: I heard about this on Olbermann first)

Old Timer
So the Hubble is still doing great science. Not that we have a plan to repair it yet... there's no money for real science when Bush still wants a moon base!

NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, with a boost from a natural "zoom lens," have uncovered what may be one of the youngest and brightest galaxies ever seen in the middle of the cosmic "dark ages," just 700 million years after the beginning of our universe.

The detailed images from Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) reveal an infant galaxy, dubbed A1689-zD1, undergoing a firestorm of star birth during the dark ages, a time shortly after the Big Bang but before the first stars reheated the cold, dark universe. Images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope's Infrared Array Camera provided strong additional evidence that it was a young star- forming galaxy in the dark ages.

"We certainly were surprised to find such a bright young galaxy 12.8 billion years in the past," said astronomer Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a member of the research team. "This is the most detailed look to date at an object so far back in time."

Oh well. I shouldn't let Bush get me down EVERY day if I can help it. This is spiffy, let's just reflect on that.

Source: Hubblesite.org

Interesting Premise
If I didn't already have so much to read, I'd want to check this book out. The premise is that the reason we have such a litigious society (about which I'm not sure I agree), is that Republicans have gutted every social institution that people would normally use to resolve problems without the civil courts... so the last resort has become the first.

Wait, this is the tech news section. Hmm. Well, is the law a technology?

I dunno. I'm lazy. It stays here.

Source: Amazon.com

Technology News

Technobabble

Kosher Phone Calls?
So it seems that in the name of religion, any form of marketing is possible.

TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Bezeq Israel Telecom, the country's dominant phone company, on Sunday launched a service that would block calls to porn and other "improper" destinations in a bid to attract ultra-Orthodox customers.

I guess that also includes Gerry the Gentile's Pork and Shellfish Emporium.

Source: Reuters

Silence Tears
Sounds like a Japanese horror movie, huh?

Basically, the story is this: recently a genomic technology called Gene Silencing was developed. Brilliant idea to help figure out what all those pesky genes DO, once you've mapped them. Simply put, it can use, I think it's a form of RNA, to turn any gene you want *off*. Then you see what the creature without that gene is like.

Some scientists have used it to create onions that won't make you cry.

Scientists in New Zealand and Japan have created a "tear-free" onion using biotechnology to switch off the gene behind the enzyme that makes us cry, one of the leading researchers said Friday.

...

"Here in New Zealand we had the ability to insert DNA into onions, using gene-silencing technology developed by Australian scientists.

"The technology creates a sequence that switches off the tear-inducing gene in the onion so it doesn't produce the enzyme. So when you slice the vegetable, it doesn't produce tears."

This was in turn based on Japanese researchers who had identified the tear-provoking enzyme's gene, and so forth.

Now, see, here's a GM food that everyone should be able to agree upon. It doesn't produce anything new, or novel, or different than a regular onion, just something less. No worries about transgene escape, about super-wild onions, etc; or about the tear-free onion causing people to, I dunno, implode.

Now if only we could silence my roommate's punching genes...

Source: Raw Story

Sniffles
As they said on Mythbusters, science isn't always nice. The Brits, in an attempt to cure some of the Common Cold, have engineered mice that can catch a kind of it they had previously been immune to.

Scientists at Imperial College London created a genetically engineered mouse susceptible to the virus causing most colds, which normally only infects humans and chimpanzees.

The breakthrough means that it should now be easier to test new cold remedies as well as treatments for other respiratory conditions like asthma and bronchitis, potentially speeding up the discovery of cures.

...

Rhinoviruses, which cause most colds, were discovered 50 years ago but studying them without being able to experiment on mice has proved difficult.

This will no doubt lead to a round of protests, but if anyone starts calling their protest image mouse Sniffles, I want a cut of the action, baby.

Source: Raw Story

Jaw
In slightly cheerier biotech news, a Finnish group has used a patient's own stem cells to grow him a new upper jaw.

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Scientists in Finland said they had replaced a 65-year-old patient's upper jaw with a bone transplant cultivated from stem cells isolated from his own fatty tissue and grown inside his abdomen.

...

Suuronen and her colleagues -- the project was run jointly with the Helsinki University Central Hospital -- isolated stem cells from the patient's fat and grew them for two weeks in a specially formulated nutritious soup that included the patient's own blood serum.

In this case they identified and pulled out cells called mesenchymal stem cells -- immature cells than can give rise to bone, muscle or blood vessels.

When they had enough cells to work with, they attached them to a scaffold made out of a calcium phosphate biomaterial and then put it inside the patient's abdomen to grow for nine months. The cells turned into a variety of tissues and even produced blood vessels, the researchers said.

Ahh, it's nice to see the Europeans doing all the cool biotech research and leaving us in the cold, isn't it, America?

Thanks El Presidente!

Source: Reuters

PS: Just in case I get some troll who insists that none of these experiments would be banned or inhibited by the Bush administration's anti-science agenda, the very existence of said agenda and the cuts in funding to basic research that goes along with it is driving a ton of work overseas, to countries not, in fact, run by religious loonies. That, and of course, our crumbling economy, non-existent infrastructure, hyperdevalued currency, etc.

Romania is the New Nigeria
So apparently, Ebay fraud is a big business in rural Romania.

They actually seem kind of proud of the phenomenon.

HUNDREDS of people in the poor Romanian town of Dragasani have grown rich by conning eBay online auction customers with deals that seem too good to be true - and often are.

The scammers have even put the new town hall up for sale on eBay, the mayor admitted last week. “I mean, who would want it?” he asked.

Despite growing concern about online frauds, the European Union has poured £150,000 into computer training courses in Dragasani over the past three years in “special recognition” of its IT skills.

“I heard about another offer on eBay selling a MiG fighter jet. There was a photo and a very good price as the customer was only being asked to pay for the fuel to fly it. One guy paid $2,000!” the mayor, Gheorghe Iordache, exclaimed.

“The victims are mainly Americans because they are on the internet most often and they’re naive,” he added. “I’ve heard about local guys who have suddenly bought apartments in Bucharest, Germany, Holland, but haven’t a job. Others have BMWs, Mercedes, Porsches and they don’t work. So where do they get the money from?”

Ahh, it's funny when global commerce is brought to a screeching, stuttering halt and honest people lose their money!

Ok, some of them are stupid. Almost all of them. But still.

Ebay should probably look into blacklisting whole blocs of Romanian IP addies until they decide to, you know, address this problem a bit more seriously.

Source: The Times Online

Countdown to Armageddon

So El Presidente is going for a high level trip to Israel, and while there the Israelis are essentially going to present him with a wish-list of places in Iran they'd like bombed.

Israel security officials are set to brief President Bush on their "Iran file" regarding the country's alleged nuclear weapons program "and how it could be destroyed - when he begins a tour of the Middle East in Jerusalem this week," the UK Times Uzi Mahnaimi reported Sunday.

"Ehud Barak, the defence minister, is said to want to convince him that an Israeli military strike against uranium enrichment facilities in Iran would be feasible if diplomatic efforts failed to halt nuclear operations," the paper added. "A range of military options has been prepared."

Gee, thanks Israel. Thanks a load.

Sigh. Sometimes you just want to crawl back into bed when doing morning news like this. But that's not for me; I must learn to feed on my rage, hone it into a sharp, evil implement with which to maim my many enemies.

Bring on the pain!