"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ" --Gandhi
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -Theodore Roosevelt
"A little revolution, now and then, is a good thing." -Thomas Jefferson-
"In my lifetime, we've gone from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. We've gone from John F. Kennedy to Al Gore. If this is evolution, I believe that in 12 years, we'll be voting for plants." -Lewis Black-
"When you're born in the world you're given a ticket to the freakshow; when you're born in America you're given a front-row seat. And some of us in the front row have notebooks and pencils." -George Carlin
ABC News: Cheney OK'd 'Torture'; Bush Insulated
Topic: Politics and Law
12:21 pm EDT, Apr 11, 2008
"Who would have thought that in the United States of America in the 21st century, the top officials of the executive branch would routinely gather in the White House to approve torture?" Kennedy said in a statement. "Long after President Bush has left office, our country will continue to pay the price for his administration's renegade repudiation of the rule of law and fundamental human rights."
Partisan divide? Absolutely. We now have a torture party and a no-torture party. There isn't a much clearer divide than that.
TED | Talks | Al Gore: New thinking on the climate crisis (video)
Topic: Current Events
5:17 pm EDT, Apr 8, 2008
In Al Gore's brand-new slideshow (premiering exclusively on TED.com), he presents evidence that the pace of climate change may be even worse than scientists were recently predicting, and challenges us to act with a sense of "generational mission"
Pretty good, his take on the arctic ice cap is powerful.
Areas of Baghdad fall to militias as Iraqi Army falters in Basra - Times Online
Topic: Current Events
7:36 pm EDT, Mar 27, 2008
With the threat of a civil war looming in the south, Nouri al-Maliki’s police chief in Basra narrowly escaped assassination in the crucial port city, while in Baghdad, the spokesman for the Iraqi side of the US military surge was kidnapped by gunmen and his house burnt to the ground.
See? The surge is working! Violence is down, so we have to keep our guys there. Wait, violence is up so we have to keep our... Enough already!
Here, this is your BEST CASE SCENARIO. We pull every out right now, let the Sunnis Shi'ites, and Kurds kick the crap out of each other for the next 6 months to a year, try to keep the Turks from invading what will soon be greater Kurdistan, try to keep the Iranians from invading to annex the eastern half of Iraq (that's the part with the oil in it) and get the hell out of the way.
Don't like that one? Here, this is your worst case.
"Her securing the nomination is certainly possible - but it will require exercising the 'Tonya Harding option.'" the official said. "Is that really what we Democrats want?"
OW! I don't think that's the kind of comparison Hillary wants.
China's pandas in new rigorous 'sexercise' programme: report - Yahoo! News
Topic: Humor
6:48 pm EDT, Mar 25, 2008
Giant pandas are known to be sexually inactive, but the new measure follows several other initiatives taken to try and encourage breeding, including panda pornography.
Talk Reason: arguments against creationism, intelligent design, and religious apologetics
Topic: Science
3:07 pm EDT, Mar 25, 2008
I went to attend a screening of the creationist propaganda movie, Expelled, a few minutes ago. Well, I tried ... but I was Expelled! It was kind of weird -- I was standing in line, hadn't even gotten to the point where I had to sign in and show ID, and a policeman pulled me out of line and told me I could not go in. I asked why, of course, and he said that a producer of the film had specifically instructed him that I was not to be allowed to attend. The officer also told me that if I tried to go in, I would be arrested. I assured him that I wasn't going to cause any trouble.
Keep reading this one. Getting expelled from Expelled is pretty funny in the first place, but read down until you get to the punch line of the story...
In this chilling BBC clip, a newsteam ventures to one of LA's new shantytowns made up of people who've lost their homes in the subprime meltdown and now live in tents, improvised shacks or RVs on abandoned land. It's the contemporary Hooverville...
Nearly 80 years later and we're moving right back to the same disaster we were looking at then. There are differences. We don't yet have the midwestern drought that destroyed agriculture for years, we have a southern one where Atlanta is in danger of turning into Las Vegas, and may get that midwestern one, but no one is sure. We don't have brokers jumping from the ledges is New York, many of those buildings were torn down and replaced with buildings that don't have ledges, or windows that open. We don't have 25% unemployment, we don't know what it actually is because the "new unemployment" doesn't count people who, after months of trying, gave up searching for work.
When the BBC is showing us the new Hoovervilles but our own media isn't. When they're also talking about the possibility that we're looking at 1929, but our media isn't. When CNNI is showing the real on the ground cost of the Iraq war across the world, but not here. Our government and our media is giving us a bill of goods.
In the model researchers studied, transmissions from the defibrillator to the bedside monitor are not encrypted, which means that someone intercepting the transmissions could retrieve such data as the patient's birth date, medical ID number and, in some cases, Social Security number.
Okay... Let's start with, what the hell is a pacemaker doing with that information? I can see where some of that information might be in the monitor, but I can't see ANY reason someone's SSN would be in it.
Now, they do bring up a better issue later on, someone could hack the machine to kill someone with one. That's an excellent blackmail plot, kill a couple of people and then do "send us this much cash or we'll shut yours down" or if you're of a terrorist bent, build a bollix to trigger every single one in the transmission radius. I imagine that could cause complete havoc.
(and yes, I know it's not a pacemaker, not the point)
not really an update: Please don't send DHS crawling up my ass over this, if I could think of this without even blinking hard, someone else could too, and they likely have the networking know how to actually do it, which I don't, so please DHS, go bother the people actually looking at stuff like this.
A McCain Gaffe in Jordan | The Trail | washingtonpost.com
Topic: Politics and Law
12:47 pm EDT, Mar 18, 2008
Pressed to elaborate, McCain said it was "common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that's well known. And it's unfortunate." A few moments later, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, standing just behind McCain, stepped forward and whispered in the presidential candidate's ear. McCain then said: "I'm sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda."
Sorry, cCain making this sort of error is nothing new, the fact that it's now being noted is. As screwed up as things are now, someone making basic mistakes like this is a problem, the nominee making this mistake is a train wreck in progress.
