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Drunk Man Nearly Hit By *Two* Trains
Simple story. A drunk driver got his van stuck on some train tracks and then got out and stood staring vacantly while the oncoming train sped toward him. A Good Samaritan type pulled him off the track in time to prevent Train A from plowing into him, as it did his car... which Train B hit a few moments later, coming in the opposite direction, creating a big splashy fireball. Both trains were traveling at 60 mph.

The Darwin Awards are cheated once again.

Source: ABC Local 7 Chicago

I'm Sure He Cares, Too
A federal judge has reiterated that the Navy cannot use its high powered sonar in environmentally sensitive areas, due to the evidence that it explodes the ears of whales and so forth. After the last ruling, Bush signed a waiver saying, no matter what courts say, the Navy can, in fact, use the sonar however it pleases. The judge has sent a ruling back, noting that he does not, in fact, have the power to waive away the law like that.

Watch and see if he cares. The Navy, maybe. El Presidente? Nope.

Source: Raw Story

Political Prosecution Continues
So Governor Siegelman's saga continues, with the Bush administration putting the kybosh on a 60 minutes story about how, mysteriously, the one Democrat in a corruption probe was the only person to face prosecution, has been held without bail on appeal, has an obviously hostile judge, etc etc.

Honestly.

Source: Atlargely.com

Repairs
Repairs are beginning on the series of internet cables (now up to 4) severed by unknown causes around the Middle East, which is good. They're hoping to get a better idea what the problem is when they haul the severed slices up, naturally.

This whole situation is odd, especially as Egypt is now saying that it wasn't a ship anchor that caused their outage.. at least, no ship was supposed to be there.

Weeeeeird.

A lot of people have made some vaguely hysterical speculation about terrorism, or this being the first salvo in a US military campaign, but I'm not buying it. As terrorist acts go, these are remarkably non-terrorizing. It would seem to involve a lot of work, and isn't actually making much of an impact. If you want to terrorize people, you disrupt their daily lives with VIOLENCE, not inconvenience. Blow up marketplaces, shoot up a mosque, that sort of thing. Being briefly without Yahoo won't exactly make people try to destroy their government.

As for the US doing it, I don't see that either. The whole point of the internet design, as originally envisioned by the DARPA types in the Cold War, is that it can be quickly routed around damaged physical segments. Originally these were to be old-fashioned telephone exchanges in the continental US, so Washington could continue sending out commands to nuke the commies after they'd already reduced much of the country to a shimmering sea of green glass, but the core principles are the same.

Sure enough, after each cut, service is largely restored within a day. They just route to another cable.

Our military may be many things, but technologically they're not dumb. They know the strengths and weaknesses of the net design; if they wanted to, say, cripple it, they could take down some or all of the root servers that attach names to IP addresses for the whole world; all of them, every last one, is under the control of the US government, as a legacy of the era when we, you know, built the internet.

So we could do the same amount of damage with a flick of a switch and a thumb of our nose. Actually, a lot more damage. Why bother with this penny-ante stuff that mostly has affected countries with tech or financial industries in the area, like India and the rich Gulf Emirates?

Me, I lean toward possible organized crime. The Russkie mob has been known for years to threaten websites and companies with attacks on their electronic infrastructure to get protection money; these cables cost a ton to lay and a ton to repair, and the companies that own them have very, very deep pockets. You can't knock out a country's internet, or inspire blood-soaked terror with these stunts, but you could really affect some giant telco's bottom line... it'd be cheaper to pay off some eastern european tech-thugs than constant repair work, that's for sure.

But hey, just a theory. It could be Cthulhu for all we know.

Source: Raw Story

Burger Phone
So Juno, the big indie candidate for the Oscars this year, had a retro looking plastic burger telephone in the movie. Supposedly they even used it as a promotional gimmick when sending out their review copies. There has since been a spike in sales of the Burger phone.

Feh. Who needs landline phones anyway? They're a big hassle.

Source: It Was Raw Story but their archives page is impossible.
Actual Phone:

Huge Sundry News Post

I'm going to get around to a big post about the Bhutto assassination, but the story over there seems to be changing by the hour, so there's not a lot of point. I had just finished my post on Afghanistan when she was killed and I saw the rumors floating down the newsie sites to that effect, but the same rumors came out a month ago at the last attempt on her life, so I just sort of shrugged and went ahead.

Oops. At any rate, have some regular news in the meantime.

Those Scientists are Real Good at Fightin', Tuggah!
So a couple of researchers at one of our Antarctic bases got drunk and into a brawl. One of them was hurt badly enough that he had to be flown to New Zealand for treatment with badly busted jaw.

Fellows, honestly, it might be a good idea to keep your tempers in check if the nearest hospital is on another continent. Just a hint.

Source: The Guardian

Uruguay Is Ahead of Us in Civil Rights
It's nice when South America joins the civilized world in making us look bad on gay rights. In this case, Uruguay has passed a national civil union law, which is a good first step.

Personally I think the government should be out of the idiot marriage business entirely, but if you're going to give tax breaks to one set of couples it's not fair to deny them to others.

Source: Page One Q

Huckabee Makes Some Hay
Bhutto's dead, so he thinks we have to clamp down the border against all those 'unusual' Pakistanis that must be headed here to assassinate OUR Pakistani politicians.

Which we have an abundance of.

This thinly veiled call for pointless racist profiling comes along with a statement about how much he respected the late politician for, well, being a woman and not a religious crazy.

Huckabee called Bhutto's death is a tragedy, but he suggested she had been a threat to Islamic fundamentalists. "An educated, sophisticated, strong, capable woman leader -- that does pose a threat to those who don't believe that women should be given that platform and that level of equality," Huckabee said.

Hmm, people who don't believe women should be given an equal platform in life... I wonder...

In August of 1998, Huckabee was one of 131 signatories to a full page USA Today Ad which declared: "I affirm the statement on the family issued by the 1998 Southern Baptist Convention." What was in the family statement from the SBC? "A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ

Wow. Pot, meet Kettle.

Sources: Radio Iowa (for the Huckabee haymaking)
The Daily Kos (for the woman-hating)

Cost of War in Iraq
This Firedoglake entry is a handy rundown of how your money is being spent, and how the death is being distributed. Short answer: 15 billion a month, and there's a handy geographical breakdown of the Lancet study showing the way we've killed 650k Iraqis in this war.

Fifteen billion per month. More dead in Iraq than died from our Civil War.

Great job, El Presidente!

Source: Firedoglake

Kucinich Mad Over Pizza Ad
His supporters are tired of him being made fun of for believing in UFOs, or refusing to say he doesn't.

Guys, seriously. I know he's got solid positions on most of the issues, but the man is a flake. Nobody's going to stop making fun of his flakiness.

Source: Plain Dealer Blog

Bush Cronies Everywhere
So there's a big kerfluffle at the Fish and Wildlife service because their top political appointee for a while was, err, sabotaging her agency's work in favor of big business. Since she got shitcanned for improperly influencing a decision to remove an animal from the Threatened species list (said animal happened to live on land she owned), they've had to reverse a ton of similarly tainted rulings, and the whole institution is in a humiliating state. Wildlife groups are now suing the administration to get records of just how corrupt she was and asesss the damage.

Aside from the all too typical Bush administration story here, you have a bit of life's unintentional humor.

"This is a lawsuit we've been forced to file to receive documents that we're entitled to that demonstrate the severity of Julie MacDonald's involvement in overturning endangered species and habitat decisions," said William Snape, the group's senior counsel. Snape filed the suit under the Freedom of Information Act.

When a guy named Snape says you're overdoing the villainy, you might want to listen.

Source: Raw Story

What a Great Venue
Beijing's legendary air pollution is still astoundingly bad, despite their draconian efforts to clear the air.

Beijingers were warned to stay indoors on Thursday as pollution levels across the capital hit the top of the scale, despite repeated assurances by the government that air quality was improving.

"This is as bad as it can get," a spokeswoman for the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau told AFP.

This isn't a fluke either, by any means.

Beijing's air quality is routinely rated among the worst in the world by international agencies such as the United Nations and the World Bank, with rampant coal burning, regular dust storms and a growing number of cars cited as the main reasons.

Heckuva job, whoever made the call to hold the Olympics there, lol.

Source: Raw Story

You Don't Need Health Care If You're Old, You Just Need A Tar Pit To Jump In
New ruling says that once you're eligible for what's left of Medicare, your employer can reneg on your health benefits and leave you out in the cold.

What a wonderful country we live in.

Source: The New York Times

"Terrorist" Walks
So there was once a guy named David Hicks. Still is, if you want to get technical. The US's mercenary allies, the drug-dealing Northern Alliance, picked him up in Afghanistan. The military said he was aiding Al-Queda, and after a sham trial, 'proved' it. He was sentenced to a long term, but allowed to serve only 9 months of it, the last of which he could serve in his home country of Australia. He's about to go free.

You have to read between the lines on this one, but if you do, the real story is readily apparent.

Hicks became the first person convicted at a U.S. war-crimes trial since World War II when he pleaded guilty in March to providing material support to al-Qaida.

The former Outback cowboy was captured in December 2001 by the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, where he had been fighting with the Taliban. A month later, he was sent to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he spent more than five years without trial.

A U.S. military tribunal sentenced Hicks — a Muslim convert who has since renounced the faith — to seven years in prison, with all but nine months being suspended, after he confessed to aiding al-Qaida during the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan following Sept. 11, 2001.

Under a plea bargain, Hicks was allowed to serve the remainder of his sentence at Yatala prison in his hometown of Adelaide in South Australia state, but was ordered to remain silent about any alleged abuse he suffered while in custody.

So, here's how it goes. This man was picked up in Afghanistan by the NA at a time we offered bounties on anyone from Al-Queda. We didn't check those claims very carefully, or at all, because the more we caught, the better it looked on paper. We sent this guy around our world tour of torture sites and did some monstrously heinous things to him, things so bad that they're still terrified he'll talk. Having not actually done anything or been a terrorist, after they beat a confession out of the man and broke him, they sent him home, to live out the rest of his days as a shell of a human being.

This is life in the American Empire, folks. Don't turn your backs.

Source: Raw Story

Wall Street Weighs In On Writer's Strike
Bear Sterns, a large investment firm, has concluded that if the writers were given absolutely everything they want it would amount to less than 1% of the annual revenue of the major studios.

Basically, the big institutional investors are starting to get pissy about how badly the studios are handling this, and I imagine this is the first in a slew of leaks designed to pressure them to settle already, before the bottom falls out of the market.

Source: Firedoglake

Denturist: A Non-Dentist Who Makes Dentures
The things you learn reading about the appalling state of dental care in Kentucky and West Virginia.

A sickening article in some respects; in others, well... if you lose all your teeth because you do meth or chew tobacco, I feel less sympathetic.

Also, the evil bastard in me can't help but joke: People in Kentucky have teeth?

Source: The New York Times

Think About This When You See One of Those Annoying Whopper Commercials
In an article about the appalling and inhuman slavery that fuels our fresh fruit industry in the US, it's nice to know that some people will go the extra mile to be dicks. Burger King is fighting an effort to slightly increase the pay given to tomato pickers because it won't 'solve' the problem. No shit. But doing nothing is better? Meanwhile, Whole Foods has been getting their tasty yuppie tomatoes from some of the more notorious slaver operations.

Ahh, corporate greed. Is there nothing they won't do for a dollar?

Jimmy Carter has been doing his usual exemplary work, trying to help these poor people. He may have been a week chief executive, but honestly, he has to have been the best human being to serve in the White House in the last century.

Source: The Independent

Lit Majors Need Help
A short article about how I Am Legend is supposedly some kind of grand symbol for the War on Terror era.

Riiight. Or, alternately, and this is just a theory: it's a shitty mediocre action movie based on a mediocre action movie based on a Vincent Price scare-flick based on a mediocre Matheson story. Written almost a half century ago. Having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.

Source: NPR