Saddam Hussein hanged

It’s official

Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging shortly before 6 a.m. (10:00 p.m. EST) on Saturday, U.S.-backed Iraqi television station Al Hurra and Arabic satellite channel Arabiya said.

There’s nothing like a kangaroo court in an illegitimate and unjust legal system executing a former dictator in secret to really bring home my country’s support of the Rule of Law and security in the righteousness of our actions.

Imagine how much weaker we would have looked had we sent Saddam to the International Crime tribunal, presented actual evidence in an impartial court, and then acted on that courts judgment. I sure am glad we didn’t go that option. Non sureties are for wimps.

Lesson to the ignorant

If you know nothing about the dark and nefarious deeds you are trying to hire someone else to do, don’t put anything in writing… like the communications director for Denny Rehberg (R-MT) did as he tried to hire some hackers to break into his university’s computer system to modify his grades.

I’d make a larger point about the GOP, cheating, and their belief that money and no morals can get you anything your abilities and effort couldn’t… but after the last 6 years, do you really need another object lesson?

Interested in some roleplay?

Why I Will Never Use Vista

Peter Gutmann does a cost analysis of Vista’s DRM and comes away… unimpressed.

Executive Summary

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called “premium content”, typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it’s not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista’s content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.

Executive Executive Summary

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

…

Denial-of-Service via Driver Revocation

Once a weakness is found in a particular driver or device, that driver will have its signature revoked by Microsoft, which means that it will cease to function (details on this are a bit vague here, presumably some minimum functionality like generic 640×480 VGA support will still be available in order for the system to boot). This means that a report of a compromise of a particular driver or device will cause all support for that device worldwide to be turned off until a fix can be found. Again, details are sketchy, but if it’s a device problem then presumably the device turns into a paperweight once it’s revoked. If it’s an older device for which the vendor isn’t interested in rewriting their drivers (and in the fast-moving hardware market most devices enter “legacy” status within a year of two of their replacement models becoming available), all devices of that type worldwide become permanently unusable.

Not that Apple’s any better with their horrendous DRM schemas. FOSS, people, it’s all about the FOSS. Right down to the hardware.

Global Warming is a Myth

Independent Island? What Island? This is not the island you were looking for. You may go about your business. Move along… move along.

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

Fuck Salon

It’s articles like the one that Gilliard quotes that guarantee I won’t be renewing my subscription… ever.

After the poor kids next door took advantage of me, I felt sympathy for the people of Houston, who’ve suffered crime and violence because of struggling Katrina exiles.

By Debra J. Dickerson

Neighborhood gossip, to which I was necessarily not privy until it was too late, was that the “Smiths” were living in the house via Catholic Charities. Maybe it was Catholic Charities, maybe it was Section 8 — who knows and what’s the difference? In any event, and given the blur of any move, it took me a few days to notice that black people lived next door (we were the only two black families) and that a never-ending stream of children ebbed and flowed from their house at all hours of the day and night. After two weeks or so, I calculated that there were seven kids (plus one mom and four surnames) next door. Their house, like mine, has three bedrooms, one bath. It was, of course, the male teenagers that most caught my eye.

Run! Black people!

And a happy and compassionate holiday season to you too.

One of my favorite uses of the word Indeed

if by “favorite” you mean “archetype of why I tend to dislike people who use it overmuch.” I present to you, Prof. Altmouse, who uses “indeed” it thusly:

It’s terrible that the poor man [Jean Charles de Menezes] was shot to death yesterday by the London police who had reason to think he was a terrorist. But should we worry that the shoot-to-kill policy will result in more deaths?… [E]veryone — at least in London — now knows not to run from the police, especially not onto a train and while wearing bulky clothing. Is it not true that yesterday’s sad mistake has already solved the problem it represents? In fact, a further good has been created: as ordinary persons change their behavior and drop the bulky clothing and unnecessary running, the real terrorists will stand out more. Indeed, if anyone ever behaves like Jean Charles de Menezes again, the presumption that he is a terrorist will be so overwhelmingly strong that the police really must kill him.…

And that, ladies and gents, is a law professor. The university that employs her must be so ashamed, though perhaps not as ashamed as her parents. I would avoid going to her site if I were you, it is so dull that you may immediately collapse and dent your forehead as it hits the front lip of your keyboard.

Do not say you haven’t been warned.

Ms. Grumpy, a known “indeed” user, is, however, completely exempt from my generalized ridicule of people who use the word “indeed.” Indeed, when she uses it, it always at precisely the right time with precisely the correct meaning. Because she rocks, y’all.

Is that an abnormal fixation on penii

or are you just happy to see us?

There’s a slow poison out there that’s severely damaging our children and threatening to tear apart our culture. The ironic part is, it’s a “health food,” one of our most popular.

Now, I’m a health-food guy, a fanatic who seldom allows anything into his kitchen unless it’s organic. I state my bias here just so you’ll know I’m not anti-health food.

The dangerous food I’m speaking of is soy. Soybean products are feminizing, and they’re all over the place. You can hardly escape them anymore.

…

Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That’s why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today’s rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products. (Most babies are bottle-fed during some part of their infancy, and one-fourth of them are getting soy milk!) Homosexuals often argue that their homosexuality is inborn because “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t homosexual.” No, homosexuality is always deviant. But now many of them can truthfully say that they can’t remember a time when excess estrogen wasn’t influencing them.

I… I… ehhhh, there’s really no need to snark in a witty-yet-devastatingly-cutting way, is there? Res ipsa, baby!

Obamarama

Looks like the righty punditocracy is already afraid enough of Obama to start pulling the stupidest shit imaginable out of their asses in order to Gore-ize his potential candidacy.

Hmm… Bush likes to parade around in military-ish uniforms. Hey, you know who else had a penchant for wearing military uniforms they had no right wearing? Herman Goering!

At least one of these two also liked drugs (cocaine and/or morphine). At least one of these two also liked getting sodomized while wearing a feather boa and fishnet stockings. I’ll let you figure out which.

Hey, ever wanted a cool domain name?

Now you can get not one, but TWO of ‘em: aceking.info and kingace.info

(this is my first time selling something on eBay. I figured… what the heck. Great business model they have, by the way - they charge you a fee to list your stuff via an entry in their database for which you do all the work. Sweet.)

Bid early, bid often!

Tits equal hits

This may be the best vlog in the history of ever.

We could all be Jose Padilla

Jose Padilla is an American citizen. With our current administration, what has happened to him could happen to any one of us at any time.

"Today is May 21," a naval official declared to a camera videotaping the event. "Right now we're ready to do a root canal treatment on Jose Padilla, our enemy combatant."

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla's bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla's legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla's cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

The videotape of that trip to the dentist, which was recently released to Mr. Padilla's lawyers and viewed by The New York Times, offers the first concrete glimpse inside the secretive military incarceration of an American citizen whose detention without charges became a test case of President Bush's powers in the fight against terror. Still frames from the videotape were posted in Mr. Padilla's electronic court file late Friday.

This is what the Bush administration believes is in its power to do to American citizens, particularly those dusky hued ne’er do wells.

Now lawyers for Mr. Padilla, 36, suggest that he is unfit to stand trial. They argue that he has been so damaged by his interrogations and prolonged isolation that he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and is unable to assist in his own defense. His interrogations, they say, included hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of "truth serums."

…

In the brig, Mr. Padilla was denied access to counsel for 21 months. Andrew Patel, one of his lawyers, said his isolation was not only severe but compounded by material and sensory deprivations. In an affidavit filed Friday, he alleged that Mr. Padilla was held alone in a 10-cell wing of the brig; that he had little human contact other than with his interrogators; that his cell was electronically monitored and his meals were passed to him through a slot in the door; that windows were blackened, and there was no clock or calendar; and that he slept on a steel platform after a foam mattress was taken from him, along with his copy of the Koran, "as part of an interrogation plan."

Yes, the current administration believes that it can hold American citizens in detention indefinitely, without access to counsel or habeas corpus. They feel they can do this to anyone Bushigula decides is an “enemy combatant.”

Mr. Padilla's situation, as an American declared an enemy combatant and held without charges by his own government, was extraordinary and the conditions of his detention appear to have been unprecedented in the military justice system.

The post 9/11 bedwetters in the public, aided by a timorous and sycophantic media, enabled the unelected authoritarians in the Bush administration (and the FBI and DoJ who had their wet dream laws all typed up and ready to go) to piss all over the Constitution.

Dr. Angela Hegarty, director of forensic psychiatry at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, N.Y., who examined Mr. Padilla for a total of 22 hours in June and September, said in an affidavit filed Friday that he "lacks the capacity to assist in his own defense."

"It is my opinion that as the result of his experiences during his detention and interrogation, Mr. Padilla does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation," Dr. Hegarty said in an affidavit for the defense.

This could be you. Or your uncle. Or your mother. Or your nephew. Or your daughter.

What pressure that could be brought to bear has been with the result that Padilla has finally been charged… as a new defendant to an ongoing case in Miami (read: they did not have the evidence to file an independent case against him). Nowhere in this indictment are any of the big propaganda scare story accusations present.

Mr. Padilla was added as a defendant in a terrorism conspiracy case already under way in Miami. The strong public accusations made during his military detention — about the dirty bomb, Al Qaeda connections and supposed plans to set off natural gas explosions in apartment buildings — appear nowhere in the indictment against him. The indictment does not allege any specific violent plot against America.

Mr. Padilla is portrayed in the indictment as the recruit of a "North American terror support cell" that sent money, goods and recruits abroad to assist "global jihad" in general, with a special interest in Bosnia and Chechnya. Mr. Padilla, the indictment asserts, traveled overseas "to participate in violent jihad" and filled out an application for a mujahedin training camp in Afghanistan.

This could be you.

"During questioning, he often exhibits facial tics, unusual eye movements and contortions of his body," Mr. Patel said. "The contortions are particularly poignant since he is usually manacled and bound by a belly chain when he has meetings with counsel."

Brady

I’m not a football fan by any means, but this is funny. It also made me reconsider my sexual orientation.

I don’t know how to quit you, Brady.

I’m a tight end
but I hope one day
to be your wide receiver
how I long for you to hit meeeee
in the slot

Genius!