A nurse has recorded the most common regrets of the dying, and among the top ones is 'I wish I hadn't worked so hard'.

Top five regrets of the dying | Life and style | guardian.co.uk

The risks associated with iodine-131 contamination in Europe are no longer "negligible," according to CRIIRAD, a French research body on radioactivity. The NGO is advising pregnant women and infants against "risky behaviour," such as consuming fresh milk or vegetables with large leaves.

French group warns citizens about Fukushima fallout

This is interesting...

Traffic has never been higher at websites that display data from radiation monitoring stations.

We list three such sites below.

One of the sites is an amateur effort anyone can participate in:

Mineralab, a Prescott, Arizona, company that sells geiger counters, maintains radiationnetwork.com, “a nationwide grass roots effort to monitor the radiation in our environment.”

The network collects data from private citizens nationwide who keep their geiger-counters running, with data uploading automatically to the website in real time.

I really want a gieger counter now. Figure they should be easy to pick up on ebay in about 6 months. :)

The EPA's own monitoring system appears to be down:

The Environmental Protection Agency’s RadNet system is designed to detect radiation from accidents like the Fukushima disaster in Japan and from foreign nuclear tests. It displays a map of the United States with monitoring stations highlighted. Click on one for a graphic representation of its data.

Last night the graphs were displaying no data—in the wake of EPA’s revelation that radiation had been detected in rainwater. Above empty frames appeared the message, in bold: “To-date, levels recorded at this monitor have been thousands of times below any conservative level of concern.”

Censorship? Consider this view: (and make sure you click through to the various source links, including about deep water horizon - especially the present dolphin kill going on in the gulf...)

The EPA has pulled 8 of its 18 radiation monitors in California, Oregon and Washington because (by implication) they are giving readings which seem too high... The EPA is considering drastically raising the amount of allowable radiation in food, water and the environment.

When things like this happen its worth asking yourself if this is one of those two times a day when the stuck clock is right.

Three Sites Where You Can Monitor U.S. Radiation Levels - Jeff McMahon - The Ingenuity of the Commons - Forbes

Requested content of direct messages with no showing of probable cause or individualized suspicion!

That could allow the account holders to claim that the 2703(d) order is unconstitutional. (One federal appeals court recently ruled that under the Fourth Amendment, a 2703(d) order is insufficient for the contents of communications and search warrant is needed, although that decision is not binding in Virginia or San Francisco.)

I think there will be a binding precedent in those circuits forthwith.

A Twitter representative declined to comment on any specific legal requests, but told CNET: "To help users protect their rights, it's our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so."

Buchanan's original order from last month directed Twitter not to disclose "the existence of the investigation" to anyone, but that gag order was lifted this week.

It's unclear why Buchanan changed her mind. Twitter didn't immediately respond to questions, but the most likely scenario is that its attorneys objected to the 2703(d) order on grounds that the law required that account holders be notified, and that the broad gag order was not contemplated by Congress when creating (d) orders in 1986 and could run afoul of the First Amendment.

The gag order also appears to have violated DOJ policies.

DOJ sends order to Twitter for Wikileaks-related account info | Privacy Inc. - CNET News

I've changed by profile picture to support EFF's anti-censorship campaign, and I have donated $100 to their cause. This is a protest and I urge you to participate. We are protesting the use of political pressure by American politicians to shut down a website.

If you believe in due process of law and the right to freedom of expression you should join us in taking a stand. It is important that we take a stand right now.

It doesn't matter whether or not you support what Wikileaks is doing. If I were handed such a rich trove of private information I might have moral qualms about dumping the whole thing on the Internet. That is totally irrelevant.

In the United States of America we are a country of laws. If Wikileaks has violated a law than the appropriate way to respond to that is through the use of the legal system. In fact, like it or not, it is most likely the case that Wikileaks has not violated the law. Therefore, senior politicians in this country have taken it upon themselves to use their personal influence to shut the website down, and a number of corporations, large and small, have obliged them.

In a free country with a strong legal system and a tradition of upholding the right to freedom of speech, this sort of thing is not acceptable. Life, liberty, and property should only be taken away through due process of law and not simply because some powerful people desire it and present thin arguments in favor of it.

As The Internet Society recently stated in their newsletter:

[Wikileaks] must be subject to the same laws and policies of availability as all Internet sites. Free expression should not be restricted by governmental or private controls over computer hardware or software, telecommunications infrastructure, or other essential components of the Internet.

Unless and until appropriate laws are brought to bear to take the wikileaks.org domain down legally, technical solutions should be sought to reestablish its proper presence...

Anger about these events runs deep. Right now, many of the companies who assisted in cutting off Wikileaks have been subjected to distributed denial of service attacks. While I share the anger of those who are launching these attacks, I cannot condon... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

Taking a principled stand on Wikileaks

WikiLeaks may well make us uncomfortable in some of what it does, though in general I believe it's done far more good than harm so far. We need to recognize, however, as Mathew Ingram wrote over the weekend, that "Like It or Not, WikiLeaks is a Media Entity." What our government is trying to do to WikiLeaks now is lawless in stunning ways, as Salon's Glenn Greenwald forcefully argued today.

These are also acts of outright censorship. No, Amazon is not bound by the First Amendment. But if it's bowing to government pressure, it's helping a panicked government tear up one of our most basic freedoms.

Defend WikiLeaks or lose free speech - Dan Gillmor - Salon.com

The US "IP Czar," Victoria Espinel, said at a conference this week that Homeland Security's seizure of a bunch of domain names was apparently just the beginning of a larger plan to go after such folks.

US Copyright Czar: Expect More Domain Censorship | Techdirt

The Homeland Security Department's customs enforcement division has gone on a Web site shutdown spree, closing down at least 76 domains this week, according to online reports....

Earlier this week, Homeland Security shut down a popular hip-hop music site, RapGodfathers.com, which had nearly 150,000 members. The site claims it is compliant with copyright laws, as it doesn't host copyrighted materials. However, its users posted links to file-hosting services such as Rapidshare and Megaupload, where copyrighted material may have been shared.

More...

What’s most disturbing in the case of OnSmash and RapGodfathers is that both sites claim to have complied with any DMCA removal requests. In the case of OnSmash specifically, the labels themselves gave the site the song links which OS provided to the public.

Homeland Security shuts down dozens of Web sites without court order | Raw Story

This rant takes a few weak swings but there are also many damning blows.

The bigger issue is whether the country can afford the systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, whether poor, middle class or even rich...

Inequality is instead the result of specific policies, including tax policies, championed by Washington Democrats and Republicans alike as they conducted a bidding war for high-rolling donors in election after election....

Those in the higher reaches aren’t investing in creating new jobs even now, when the full Bush tax cuts remain in effect, so why would extending them change that equation?

Read the whole thing...

Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich? - NYTimes.com

The idea that baby boomers weren't paying enough taxes to cover their social security benefits has been well understood for 20 years or more. Nothing has been done about it yet. Now, of course, it is too late to ask them to pay their share because they are too old to pay and too close to retirement to adjust to changes in their plans. Now that we're close enough to seal the deal for the boomers, we're going to "fix" the problem by cutting benefits for the next generation.

Folks at 25 or 30 years old today aren't going to get Social Security at 65 or 67.

They are also going to cut the mortgage interest deduction, pouring gasoline on top of the housing market debacle that is crushing the middle class, and they are going to cut income taxes for the super wealthy.

After not doing anything at all about the civil liberties issues that prompted many young people to vote for him, Obama is going to turn around fuck our economic future. Go team Obama!

You are getting fucked because you are not a large enough demographic group to matter politically.

Debt Commissioners: Baby Boomers Will Crush Social Security, Medicare - FoxNews.com