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The phone companies have to collect enough information to allow traffic analysis, just so they can send out bills.

It's illegal for them to hand that information over to the government. Even Republican Arlen Specter said "There is no doubt that the NSA program violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act"

There is no such law to forbid phone companies from selling call records to private consumer research firms. As far as I know, there's no law forbidding the NSA from being yet another customer of the consumer research firms. Presto, "information laundering".

If the NSA stops grabbing call records, with a great show of reluctance and a few smear tactics against their critics, the next thing to check is whether they're still getting the exact same information.

...such a this one. I used it to send a letter to the author of the linked article. This letter is enclosed below. If it contains factual errors, let me know; I may have listened to the wrong slashbots.

In "U.S. Joins Industry in Piracy War" you seem to allude to the shutdown of The Pirate Bay early on when you say mention an "illegal file-sharing Web site" in Sweden. Numerous Swedes have been working to set people straight on this - The website "The Pirate Bay" was in no way illegal under Swedish law because it does not itself contain any copyrighted materials, only links to the same. Your assertion that their site is illegal is libelous at best, since Swedish law does not prohibit such a site. In fact, their law only prohibits the exchange of copyrighted material - having it unshared on your hard disk is not a crime.

Copyright law in the US was intended to protect our cultural heritage, not to provide profit to copyright holders in perpetuity. It is now little more than a shield that megacorporations can hide behind so that they have no need to innovate and bring us something NEW. The two acts which extended copyright were far from being in the interest of the American people.

The seizure of TPB's servers illustrates that fascism is alive and well, and spreading throughout the world. The police in fact seized numerous servers that did not even belong to TPB as an apparent scare tactic to bring ISPs in line with their wishes, even though they were not backed up by law - if you harbor those who are practicing their legal rights, you may in fact lose business because we will interfere with it, deliberately and without cause.

By referring to TPB's actions as illegal, you are helping to perpetuate a fraud against the entire planet.

Hopefully I was correct about all this, but the claims I have made above were made in many long-standing high-score comments in the last discussion about this subject, and not refuted, so hopefully peer review will have made me sound like I know what I'm talking about.

Gore based his claim on a survey done by UCSD Science Studies professor, Naomi Oreskes. She summarized her findings in a Washington Post editorial that can be found here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A260 65-2004Dec25.html

From her editorial:

There have been arguments to the contrary, but they are not to be found in scientific literature, which is where scientific debates are properly adjudicated. There, the message is clear and unambiguous.

The Journal of Science paper in which she details her survey can be found here:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/306/ 5702/1686

Naturally, claims of bias in the right-leaning popular press have followed. See this U.K. Telegraph article for an example:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2005/05/01/wglob01.xml

"It's only slavery if they can't quit and walk."

They can't walk because they're too tired from working 15 hours a day. And they most likely can't quit because in the area where they live all the other jobs are the same. why quit working at apple 15 hours a day to go work for nike for 14 hours a day?

I realize that, technically, it isn't slavery, but to bicker over technical details when something is so obviously wrong (namely the exploitation of poor people in china so american and chinese business people can line their pockets) is completely absurd, and also unbelievably common. this is the strategy used by many politicians when something goes blatantly wrong...focus on minute details that have no bearing on the actual problem, but serve to distract some people and convince others that there was nothing wrong in the first place. this is what the bush administration does, and what many other politicians do too.
I read a story, or maybe it was on tv, about people in china who worked at a factory, and at this factory, they made enough money to either go home and come back (bus fare) or eat. they could not do both. now, technically, they could leave whenever they wanted to (so by your definition, they wouldn't be slaves), but then they would have to find food. Here are some other examples...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8iwJTMW9t0

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22507-20 04Feb7?language=printer

"But there's nothing that I've read that suggests that Apple (or any other western employer) can coerce the government at any level into indenturing Chinese citizens to their foreign 'masters'. Considering their history, one would find that possibility quite unlikely."

Apple doesn't need to do any coercing, the class system is already in place. All apple needs to do is to back a dump truck full of money up to the door of a chinese government official and ask to set up a factory.

Yea but what communication channels do you (a third party) have to reach people? For people to do their own research?

Newspaper
TV/Radio
Internet

Now rules have come along lately and changed ownership rules for the first two, and lo-and-behold net neutrality could stand to threaten the third.

Its kinda like the education system in this country - if all kids know are facts and not how to engage in logic, reason and critical thinking, what chance do they have? They'll just believe whatever their preferred party tells them and assume that the other party is wrong without listening to the other side and thinking about why they say that - is there some valid reasons or are they just batshitinsane?

For us geeks, did you know you can subscribe to RSS feeds for your elected officials to see what votes they have made lately?

Smoking marijuana leads to an increased risk of cancer just like tobacco does well... actually, no.

Maybe you should ask someone who knows a bit more about technology than you do. I think that Paris Hilton may be able to tell you a few things about how T-Mobile operates.

... In Washingtonpost. To quote the first few lines Congress is about to cast a historic vote on the future of the Internet. It will decide whether the Internet remains a free and open technology fostering innovation, economic growth and democratic communication, or instead becomes the property of cable and phone companies that can put toll booths at every on-ramp and exit on the information superhighway.

At the center of the debate is the most important public policy you've probably never heard of: "network neutrality."

Paris Hilton's phone's content wasn't "hacked" using bluetooth, a teenager exploited a flaw in T-Mobile International's code to gain access to her web account, which to my understanding mirrored the content of the phone.

For all of the commenters asking for a source, here it is: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/05/07/AR2005050700178.html.

Speaking of war over fruit...

-

If there was enough to rise to the level of "electronic Protected Health Information" then the big guns of HIPAA swivel in the VA's direction.

Slashdot notices a month-old scandal.

Thieves steal personal data of 26.5M vets

Theft of Data Leads to Firings

Sounds like someone needs to educate themselves.
I have read the downing street memo. Have your read any of these?
here
here
and here

The only reason anyone thought there was actually WMDs in Iraq was because the Bush administration and Tony Blair lied about the intelligence.
Yeah, all those dead Kurds with chemical burns had nothing to do with it.

Bush and Blair both knew that the intelligence was inaccurate, their very sources said so and said not to base any action on that intelligence.
So who do you belive? The intelligence or the people that say the intelligence was wrong. Do you wait around to see who is right?

Not everyone knew how faulty the intelligence was.
You mean that John Kerry, John Edwards, Bill Clinton and Al Gore all had different intelligence than GWB? What about Putin? He sent a warning to GWB saying that Iraq was planning to attack the US? Do you discount his intelligence too? It's not like he wanted us to go into Iraq. Why would he lie? After 9/11, do you still sit around seeing if anything happens before acting on it? Don't you think that would be just a bit irresponsible?

Now, Bill Clinton certainly did lie under oath. However, he lied under oath about what he was doing with his penis in private -- something a lot of douchebag conservatives would probably lie about, even under oath.
OK... like I said in the grand-parent that you ignored, much like anything else that runs counter to your opinion. How about if I rape your wife/daughter/mother? It's my penis. I don't see how it's any of your business what I do with it. If I choose to lie about it, why do you care?

Now FOAD, you disengenous piece of shit.
I've presented valid arguments with facts and logic. You sling insults.

Global warming went up the most during the time Gore was in power, according to Gore's own charts. He also flies around the country in a jet to give his lectures, polluting more air than most people do driving a car for a year.

The most damning contradiction is that the global temperature record shows that worldwide average temperatures have not risen since 1998.

By the way, please do not use your recycling bin. It is more damaging to the environment to recycle paper in those dirty refineries then it is to just plant more trees and make new paper. Whenever you buy paper, what you're doing is ordering new trees to be planted by logging companies. Trees are a renewable resource. Most people have been taught all their lives to recycle paper because evil loggers are taking down all our forests to the point of extinction, which was never true. Greenpeace even inadvertently admitted its alarmism in a recent gaffe.

Environmentalism today is really a lot of college freshman getting together and holding marches against "globalism" and "corporatism." It's not about the environment anymore; that's just a ruse. The most amusing part is that they organize these anti-globalism movements using cell phones and the Internet, the most global technologies of all.

For all this discussion has focused on the "debate" about global warming, if you think that political interference is limited to environmental science, you're missing a very, very big picture.

Let me start off by saying that scientific advancement is not a left-right issue, and should never be viewed through the narrow prism of party politics. However, the United States has fallen into a (man-made) rut of EVERYTHING being split down partisan lines (even national security, even voting integrity, even scientific research) so that is the playing field we are on, whether we like it or not. Wedge politics infect every issue now.

Under this administration, the religious right has exerted undue influence over decisions ranging from:

• blocking OTC access to emergency contraceptives
• stalling approval of a vaccine for HPV which would prevent cervical cancer
• censoring vital information about sex by imposing abstinence-only education on teens
• forcing doctors by law to peddle phony information about a phony link between abortion and breast cancer

(source article for that list, a must-read)

And without going on a daylong linkhunt, they are passing bad information about condom effectiveness, intimidating non-profit organizations which do not toe the party line on reproductive issues, and denying USAID funds to overseas orgs which even mention abortion, or distribute condoms as part of family planning efforts. (Imagine sending $15B to Africa to fight AIDS without distributing or even even mentioning condoms! Talk about throwing good money away...It's like fighting fires without water, it's that foolish.)

And don't even let's discuss the bi-partisan support for embryonic stem cell research which has been effectively neutered under this administration. Or the medical expertise of Dr. Bill Frist in the case of a braindead woman he never examined, or his patently absurd claim that AIDS may be transmitted via tears and sweat.

Sadly, I could document this sort of war on objective science all day, but I think I've made my point. It infests the policy debate over far more than global warming, and if you think there's no difference between the parties on this, you're sadly, tragically mistaken.

Dude, Terry Schiavo is not a terribly complex issue, and there was nothing "questionable" about her state. As was clearly documented at the time, her brain was gone. Tragic, but true. Those desperately trying to pretend that she had some higher-order function left were denying science, medicine, and facts. The craven politicians trying to get mileage out of the tragedy were disgusting, even by Washington D.C. standards, with actual-doctor Bill Frist the most egregious and hypocritical.

You know absolutely nothing about how our system works.

On the contrary, I do know how the system works. Jury nullification is pretty much as I have described it, but *the courts* (you know, the ones you said "just judge") have been working to destroy that mechanism (of course, since they are there for power, not for right.) It still exists in some venues, however. The courts haven't managed to stamp the citizens completely into the mud as yet.

I thought you were capable of discussion. Instead, you wipe the slate clean, deriding it as systematically and fatally flawed, and you sound, sir, like a crackpot.

It is, in point of fact, my belief that the legal system is completely, utterly broken, rarely providing anything that remotely resembles justice, often dispensing injustice, almost entirely bereft of fairness, yet standing ready to dispense favor to those with power, money, or both. Compounding matters, it is my belief that a huge number of the laws that the system finds worthy of enforcing are bad, in the sense of being inherently wrong (which I call "evil"), laws. It is my right (still, just barely) to hold and espouse these opinions.

If debate is what you seek, then all you have to do is bring a winning argument to the table. I am perfectly capable of saying, "why sir, you are right, and I stand corrected." That you have failed to do that is not my problem. It is yours. That you have put into a public forum statements that show you do not understand the area of argument is also your fault; but that is not an uncommon result when an attempt is made to defend an inherently flawed idea, ideal, or social structure.

As for the name-calling... definitely a point for you sir, to have so successfully demonstrated your devotion to the character of your profession. :-)

Until you learn about how the system currently works, you will continue to be frustrated, and you will never make progress as you will be fighting something that only exists in your mind.

It would appear that I do know how it works. Which raises the question as to why you really ran off, O jewel of Legal Authority. :-) As regards my "frustration", you are simply mistaken. I have found that the populace in general, and the legal profession as a specific sub-sector of the population, very rarely fails to meet my expectations. The both of you have made this mess; and now you shall simply have to live in it. I am certainly not interested in trying to save you from yourself. I just think you should be interested in doing so. But this, alas, requires that you have a fully developed set of ethics, and being in law... well, I'm sure you know what I'm thinking. And why.

As soon as I began working from home I built myself a desk that is at chest height. Literally the top of my desk is just under my armpits.

I have found that standing at my desk all day eleminates all the hunching over problems. I can rest my arms on the desk, I can bounce my legs and move around all day as I am working. Compared to bouncing my legs endlessly while sitting.

Of course my friends initially made fun of me, saying "Dude that is way high, what did you do? Screw up when measuring before building it?" I said it just seemed natural to want to stand, perhaps from working in server rooms early in my career.

After a bit of searching I found I was not alone, including Donald Rumsfeld, Sir Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Virginia Woolf, and even Thomas Jefferson

10 reasons to use a stand-up desk.

I'll never go back to sitting all day.

>The administration has already put antiwar groups (such as the Quakers, known terrorists all) under surveillance.

Here's a cite about the Quakers.

>What is it about George Bush that makes conservatives want to give him authority unchecked by due process, separation of power, and public scrutiny?

The ones who are not being cut in on the loot may be impressed that President Bush is a messenger from God.

I'm not a conservative but they deserve fair discussion and trutheful description: conservatives are seething about many of this administration's policy decisions, and conservatives would *never* endorse repealing the Constitution.

Yes, they have low prices, but at what cost? You might find the following article about how they outsource their maintenance mainly to El Salvador where according to the article:

"Roughly one-third of the Salvadoran mechanics have passed the exam that qualifies them for the Federal Aviation Administration's license, while in the United States, such licenses are required for all mechanics employed directly by the airlines."

Kind of scary, eh?

They are truly the model of how an airline should be, focused on the passenger, their cost, and experience, not simply a government-bailed-out bloated corporation that sells seats next to each other for hundreds and thousands different than the seat next to them.

Have a good read and get back to me on if you think the lowest prices possible is worth the safety risks, which I see you did not mention they focus on safety.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/09/27/AR2005092701467.html

But that isn't what we're talking about. We're talking about the NSA wiretaps and phone record collection that began AFTER 9/11.


WRONG. It started BEFORE 9/11.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2006/0 5/telephone_records_are_just_the.html

And that's a point I've been trying to make. People have been in a tizzy about it only now, but it's been going on for a long time.


So you're saying the ends justify the means, then? Ok, I want to be rich. Do you mind if I come slaughter your family and steal your house? You do? But the ends justify the means. Wait, it's unjust for me to get rich that way?


Apples and oranges. Or more like apples and baseballs. Everyone presumes the government is going to pre-empt our enemies only in order for it to become our enemy itself. Ridiculous, if you consider our own Revolutionary history.


So we DO need more invasive surveillance? How much is too much, for you? Cameras in your bathroom at home? Forgive the hyperbole but it certainly seems as though that's exactly what you would find appropriate.


I pasted in "invasive" by mistake. But I AM suggesting that more surveillance will certainly be useful in prosecuting the war on terror.

If this company bribes the right politicians, and promises some kind of benefit to a given congressman's state, then it WILL happen.

Provided the congresscritter believes the public won't get too freaked out by the results. The folks in Congress are still elected. Also, there are plenty of other private interests that are likely opposed to RFID tagging of immigrants. After all, business lobbies are already putting up a fight against more restrictive immigration controls.

For every private interest or public interest group in favor of particular legislation, there are almost always some on the other side fighting vigorously for their interests. While immigrants don't have a strong lobby, big business makes a buttload of money off them, and don't want to see that revenue stream disappear.

even though the 9/11 terrorists crossed from Canada
No they didn't. Being Canadian this bit of fud always pisses me off. As simple google search and you'll turn of lots of links to dispute this. Like this this and this

Let's not forget that not one, NOT ONE terrorist has EVER been caught crossing the US-Mexican border. However, the potential LAX bomber was caught trying to cross over into the US from Canada (turns steely glare directly north).

According to the Washington Post , the US has a laughingly low number of border patrol agents on the northern border.

From TFA: "The United State posts more than five agents per mile across our southern border. By contrast, we post less than one agent every five miles across our northern border. What's more, as the United States has cut off urban crossing points in places such as El Paso and San Diego, it has forced many illegal immigrants to go through the Arizona desert -- a brutal journey, particularly for someone with no knowledge of the terrain. Would-be terrorists coming from Canada are not only less likely to be caught, they are less likely to die along the way.

There also happen to be many more potential jihadists in Canada. Unlike Mexico, with its negligible Arab and Muslim population, Canada in recent decades has welcomed large numbers of immigrants from the Middle East. And while the vast majority are law-abiding, Canadian authorities estimate that roughly 50 terrorist groups operate in the country. In their study, Leiken and Brooke identify three suspected terrorists who have tried to enter the United states from Canada, including Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian native arrested in December 1999 on his way to blow up Los Angeles International Airport."

I love my country, but seriously, this is just so out of hand now. To paraphrase The Talking Heads: "We're on a road to nowhere."

One could argue that point... if one were Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, et al.

The fact is there's been a sharp rise in global terrorism.

Things are going so well that the State Department has ceased publishing terrorist statistics as they're legally mandated to do.

U.S. ports are extremely vulnerable. Airports are still vulnerable.

I'd say you should be counting yourself lucky, not well-protected.

http://www.lurhq.com/arhiveus.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/05 /ransomware_rising_1.html

March 23, 2006 No Accountability

The cop who shot Sal Culosi won't face charges:

The Fairfax County police officer who shot an unarmed man to death in January will not be charged with a crime, the county's chief prosecutor announced this afternoon.

From the start, Fairfax police declared that the killing of Salvatore J. Culosi Jr., 37, was an accident and that the SWAT officer who fired had done so unintentionally. Fairfax Commonwealth's Attorney Robert F. Horan Jr. said that when a person fires a gun without malice and unintentionally kills someone, "they do not commit a crime."

I'm calling bullshit, here. In 30+ years as a prosecutor, Mr. Horan has never pursued charges against a police officer. Not once.

Horan said the officer was aware that he should not have had a finger on the trigger and that he should not have had his .45-caliber H&K handgun pointed at anyone. "As he [the officer] says, you keep your finger straight," Horan said. "He felt his finger was straight. . . . But obviously his finger is not straight up. His finger has to be on the trigger."

Tests showed no defect in the gun.

So a cop draws his gun and points it at a suspect (a no-no), has his finger on the trigger (a no-no), the gun goes off and kills a man, and Horan can't find enough to make the case for criminal negligence?

And why don't we get to know the name of Culosi's killer?

Let's apply these standards to a civilian. Let's say I'm showing my new, legally-purchased MP5 to a buddy. Just for kicks, and wholly without malice, I pretend like I'm a cowboy cop, and my friend assumes the role of the hapless optometrist I suspect of gambling. I pretend I'm raiding his home, point the gun at him, and, having put my finger on the trigger and having forgotten there's a bullet inside, the gun goes off, killing my friend.

Anyone think the police would hold off on releasing my name to the press?

Anyone think I'd escape criminal negligence charges?

More here:

March 29, 2006 Sal Culosi Update

A few items culled from the Justice for Sal site maintained by Culosi's family:

1) A couple of weeks ago, the Fairfax Police Department incredulously issued a news release warning that it would be cracking down on illegal NCAA tournament pools. Three months after one of its officers shot and killed Culosi, Fairfax PD titled its press release, "Illegal Gambling Not Worth the Risk." Words fail.

2) Here's a very recent case from Portsmouth, Virginia in which a kid was convicted of involuntary manslaughter after accidentally shooting a friend. The case is significant because Fairfax prosecutor Robert Horan has repeatedly insisted that Virginia law won't let him charge Officer Bullock with a crime. The facts of the Portsmouth case pretty clearly suggest otherwise.

3) The Washington Post weighs in with another editorial, this time with pointed criticism of Horan for declining to bring charges. The Post also reiterates its position against using SWAT teams for routine policing.

1. Bush claims he is not bound by any laws. The Attorney General agrees with him. How would *you* define dictatorship?
2. "free speech zones", reprisals/threats against people not toeing the party line. Sure sounds like he's suppressing things.
3. Industry controls government, which is even worse.
4. Invading other countries, citizens with guns at the borders, mainstream conservative pundits allying themselves with white supremacist groups and repeating their talking points. If that's not extreme, you're certainly well on your way.
5. With all the "patriots" talking about how they'd love to go to Iraq (if only they weren't too old, too sick, etc) and kill them some sandniggas, it's only a matter of time before racism becomes an acceptable political platform (see also point 4). Right now, the administration's policies are mostly working against the poor, which just happens to include minorities.

Serbia, Iraq, Syria, and Aghanistan. You can look it up.

You mean the NATO bombing campaign in Serbia? That was an allied act. The others, eh, not so much. They were however limited strikes and not an all out war and cannot be compared to what went on in Iraq and against so much world sentitment. Some of us do believe in military policing action but not in all out invasion, especially as poorly planned out as this one was.

I'm just playing devil's advocate. Clinton intentionally turned his back on China's human rights violations, which include ACTUAL torture and transmigration (killing off the male population, colonizing and breeding a people out of existence).

I'm really unhappy with Clinton putting globalization and business interests over human rights too, but are you suggesting that what went on in Abu Ghraib wasn't "ACTUAL" torture?

Devil's Advocate, huh? Okay, well I might could swallow that position if your argument didn't rest on what went on in Abu Ghraib not being torture.

I mean, okay, maybe in your sick mind being stripped naked, forced to simulate sex acts with other men, and being leashed and collared like a dog isn't all that torturous, but a lot more went on there. Some of the sexual degradation included being forced to masturbate while on video tape, being forced to stand naked and hooded on boxes for days, and an reported case of a female prisoner being raped. The degradation and humiliation is stomach churning. There's an image out there of a man being forced to walk a straight line by a female officer while naked, covered in feces, and with bound ankles.

In additions there were repeated beatings and attacks with fist and blunt objects. One of the described attacks was a sergeant punching a man so hard in the chest that he almost went into cardiac arrest. People were threatened with dogs and there was at least one report of a detanee actually being attacked and severely wounded by a dog.

There were prisoners who died in the "care" of the guards responsible for the torture. The most famous is Manadel al-Jamadi whose ice-packed corpse was made famous thanks to an image of Specialist Charles Graner posing and giving a thumbs-up over it. He died after a half-hour interrogation that involved suspending him by his wrists from a barred window while his wrist were bound behind his back. What killed him was a blood clot from the vicious beating he took during his interrogation.

Are the "soldiers" involved doing hard time for murder? Of course not, they've been handed a slap on the wrist related to what a civillian would've gotten for that kind of crime. Heck, drug smokers and shoplifters sometimes get harsher sentences than these sociopathic animals got. While Chinese excesses are really bad, don't think that we've been angels. You cannot excuse our behavior by saying that the Chinese are worse. That's like saying that Saddam's an okay guy because he didn't kill as many of his own people as Pol Pot did.

The fact that we have apologists for Abu Ghraib and that they're not uncommon shows that we are in one of the darkest periods of American history. What killed your sense of outrage?

Remember that guy who was going to be court martialed for shooting those poor, wounded men in a mosque a while back. I think you're referring to the wrong Iraqis. The two guys here weren't wounded before they were shot.

Yes, I read it. Did you? The same method was used for 2004 and 2005 numbers. Furthermore, numbers using the old method are also available for 2004: 655 in 2004, versus 175 in 2003 (see here)).
So what this shows is the number of attacks has about tripled year over year for the last 2 years. "ever-increasingly dangerous world" sounds about right...

The mortal threat to New Orleans, as Katrina plowed into the Gulf Coast, was not the powerful winds -- Mississippi took the brunt of those -- but the massive storm surge the hurricane generated. We now know that the levees, floodwalls and other barriers protecting the city were, for the most part, plenty tall enough and theoretically strong enough to keep the waters at bay. On paper, New Orleans should have ended up wet and wounded, but basically intact.

A year ago I was charged with two counts of premeditated murder and with other war crimes related to my service in Iraq. My wife and mother sat in a Camp Lejeune courtroom for five days while prosecutors painted me as a monster; then autopsy evidence blew their case out of the water, and the Marine Corps dropped all charges against me ["Marine Officer Cleared in Killing of Two Iraqis," news story, May 27, 2005].

Scientists in Germany said yesterday that they had retrieved easily obtained cells from the testes of male mice and transformed them into what appear to be embryonic stem cells, the versatile and medically promising biological building blocks that can morph into all kinds of living tissues.

If similar starter cells exist in the testes of men, as several scientists yesterday said they now believe is likely, then it may not be difficult for scientists to cultivate them in laboratory dishes, grow them into new tissues and transplant those tissues into the ailing organs of men who donated the cells. The technique would have vast advantages over the current approach to growing "personalized" replacement parts -- an approach that has stirred intense political controversy because it requires the creation and destruction of cloned human embryos as stem cell sources. The new work suggests that every male may already have everything he needs to regenerate new tissues -- at least with a little help from his local cell biologist.

[...]
[...]
[...]
They showed that under carefully controlled conditions, those cells can become "multipotent adult germline stem cells" that share all the characteristics of embryonic stem cells.

[...]
[...]
[...]
German scientists have great incentive to find alternatives to human embryonic stem cells, because government restrictions on human embryo cell research in Germany are even more severe than they are in the United States, where federally funded scientists are banned from working on embryonic stem cell colonies created after August 2001.

That's what I get for skimming without my glasses on so early in the morning, and for reading this Slashdot article right after an article on Arnie. My subconscious at work....or snoozing.

No, Nixon's Southern strategy was intended to get the racist to vote Republican, and it's still considered a valid tactic in the GOP. It's why Zel Miller made it all the way up North to Cincinatti with Bush in '04, but got his ticket home before heading up into Akron and Cleveland.

You resorted to this ditto Byrd screed? How effin original. Byrd was indeed a racist, as well as a KKK member throughout most of the forties, but I mentioned Nixon's Southern Strategy in 1968.

From Wikipedia:

In the NAACP's Congressional Report Card for the 108th Congress (spanning the 2003-2004 congressional session), Byrd was awarded with an approval rating of 100% for favoring the NAACP's position in all 33 bills presented to the United States Senate regarding issues of their concern. Only 16 other Senators of the same session matched this approval rating. In June 2005, Byrd proposed an additional $10 million in federal funding for the Martin Luther King memorial in Washington, DC, remarking that "With the passage of time, we have come to learn that his Dream was the American Dream, and few ever expressed it more eloquently."

From a 2005 Washington Post Book Review:

James Tolbert, president of the West Virginia chapter of the NAACP and an occasional critic of the senator, said Byrd transcended his past by gradually embracing more enlightened social views and by simply owning up to his past mistakes. "He doesn't try to lie his way out of things," Tolbert said. "If he's wrong, he'll say he's wrong."

[. . .]

Still, says Ken Hechler, 90, a liberal Democratic former U.S. House member from West Virginia who served with Byrd in Congress, "It's impossible for anyone to try to whitewash the KKK and its overall symbolism."

"But at the same time," he added, "we honor those people who publicly admit the error of their ways."

Last week, Byrd said: "I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times . . . and I don't mind apologizing over and over again. I can't erase what happened."

Eric Pianin, "A Senator's Shame: Byrd, in His New Book, Again Confronts Early Ties to KKK", Washington Post, June 19, 2005

The KKK charges at Byrd are an ad hominem attack attempting to downplay his eloquent antiwar sppeches upon the Senate floor, by a grouping of the usual suspects for disinformation's right-sided insertion, most notably in this case Malkin and Horowitz. Horowitz's traitorous past makes him an extremely reprehensible hypocrite in this regard. They cannot refute his antiwar, and instead play an evil game.

Byrd has admitted his mistakes, many times. Horowitz just blames the left for his newlefty evilness. Who is the better man.

The next time you get surprised by Congress' tone deafness, remember that they can get all worked up about a colleage getting raided, but not about a 80 year old couple getting raided under obviously horrendously false pretenses. They don't care about serving the public. Their approval ratings, both parties, are starting to approach single digits. If there was ever a time that it should be obvious that we live under the rule of an unaccountable, bifactional ruling party it would be now.

The ISS was put up a few years ago piece by piece and cost over a hundred billion dollars just in construction; NASA allocates another $10-20BN a YEAR for it. What did it get us? A plaything for the world's richest people, something for space fetishists to admire ("the sense of WONDER!") and something to put in our kids textbooks (which even in the US, they're starting to have to share because school budgets are getting slashed.)

A hundred billion dollars buys a lot of cement, plywood, 2x4's, and tin roofing. Buys a lot of wheat/rice/corn. It also buys a lot of tractors, schoolbooks, etc. To put things in perspective: the US's largest construction project, The Big Dig in Boston, MA, was unbelievably extensive and complex; 10 years, countless engineering challenges, and they overhauled Boston's inner highways and tunnels while keeping the city (mostly) moving. Despite the problems with cost overruns and fraud on the part of various contrators, it came in at about $15BN for a decade of work.

The 2005 Federal budget included about $65B for the department of Health and Human services, $53B for the department of Education, $50B for the Department of Transportation, $30B for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. That's pretty much the meat and potatoes of all the major social things (well, except law enforcement). It totals $150B, and that is to handle the needs of about $230M people in one of the better-off nations in the world. The cost of "doing business" government-wise in Africa is probably a fraction of that; you don't need 5 tomes of federal highway standards, for example, to build a road from A to B. You just grade things, put down some tar, and stick some signs in the ground, and you're 75% there.

Given what a Billion Dollars can do in terms of basic human necessities and a country's infrastructure...yeah, I do get really pissed off every time I think about the International Space Station. Tom Toles, a Washington Post cartoonist, drew up this great comic on the endless circular nature of NASA.

The First Amendment, as extended through the Fourteenth and interpreted by the Supreme Court, bars government institutions from punishing or rewarding anyone on the basis of almost all speech. Note that the school in question is a public school, and thus is a government institution and bound by that law. Too bad Alberto Gonzalez just struck down the first ammendment earlier this week. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/05/21/AR2006052100348.html Which is exactly the situation you are describing. The government punishing people for "speaking" in a public forum. Here's hoping the Supreme Court has a moment of lucidity when this goes in front of them.

there haven't been comparible incidents for wingnut Christians to get up in arms about.

• "Piss Christ"
• The elephant-dung Madonna.
• Hateful characterizations of all people who do not practice Wahhabi Islam

Convince a French magazine to draw Christ as a bomb toting terrorist and we'll see.

I find it very ironic that every point you raised as a hypothetical already has evidence which supports the case that Islamic societies (and probably Islam itself) are inherently barbaric even compared to the worst the USA has to offer.

According to the autopsy, this drug would have had to have done a lot more than described here. Maybe if they'd given it to her when she first fell into a coma (we'll never know) but by the time she died, her brain was irreperable.

I hate Democrat hate blogs that are out there and focus on half of one side of a story to make it look as bad as possible for anyone other than themselves.

The worst part, is that they link to themselves over and over and over and over and over and over worse than a hick family tree were all the grandmas grandpas, children and grand children descended fromt he same 2 people.

Take a recent look on google for "Cheney Indictment" and you will see hundreds of Democrat blogs on the subject, all citing other democrat blogs as the definitive and truthful source, when in the end the story was put up as a sensational tabloid article with no truth behind it at all. ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/links et/2005/04/11/LI2005041100587.html )

Bloggers are not the new news media, they are just a bunch of people who have found out a place were people will read their opinions, nod their heads, and help them mentally wack themselves off at how awsome they are and how many people they can get to agree.

Plagarism isnt even the half of it, these people cite sources that cite sources to the point were it would be difficult to find out were the original story came from, its like a horrible game of telephone gone awry, or the before mentioned incestuous family forgetting whose kid little jenny is.

Let the Deconstruction begin!

the news

• DOJ Press Release on Detroit FBI's Public Website-March 29, 2006
• Nineteen Charged with Racketeering to Support Terrorist Organization

DETROIT - An indictment charging 19 individuals with operating a global racketeering conspiracy was unsealed in federal district court today, announced United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan Stephen J. Murphy. The indictment alleges that portions of the profits made from the illegal enterprise were given to Hizballah, a foreign terrorist organization. Nine of the individuals were arrested this morning.

[. . .]

An indictment is only a charge and is not evidence of guilt. A defendant is entitled to a fair trial in which it will be the government's burden to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

This is evidence of nothing, given this administration's miserable failures at securing terror convictions using due process of law, and their reprehensible practise of inhumane detainment of humans who have not been properly convicted in an equitable judicial process, in blatant violation of the 4th, 5th, 8th and 13th Amendments to the US Constitution.

The trials of Sami al-Arian and Sami al-Hussayen immediately stand out:

1. Peter Whoriskey, "Ex-Professor Won Court Case but Not His Freedom", Washington Post, December 14, 2005
2. Maureen O'Hagan, "A terrorism case that went awry", Seattle Times, November 22, 2004

Originalize this:

"The Habeas Corpus secures every man here, alien or citizen, against everything which is not law, whatever shape it may assume."

Thomas Jefferson - Letter to A.H. Rowan - September 26, 1798
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Definitive Edition"
Albert Ellery Bergh, Editor (1907) - Chapter 10 pg 61

"Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions? The parties who may be arrested, may be charged instantly with a well-defined crime; of course, the judge will remand them. If the public safety requires that the government should have a man imprisoned on less probable testimony, in those than in other emergencies, let him be taken and tried, retaken and retried, while the necessity continues, only giving him redress against the government, for damages. Examine the history of England. See how few of the cases of the suspension of the habeas corpus law, have been worthy of that suspension. They have been either real treason, wherein the parties might as well have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was shameful they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that operation is now become habitual, and the minds of the nation almost prepared to live under its constant suspension."

Thomas Jefferson - Letter to James Madison - July 31, 1788
ibid - Chapter 7 pg 97, 98

concrete

"US lists 10 foiled terror plots", BBC News, October 7, 2005

The White House has given details of 10 major terror plots that President Bush says have been foiled by the US and its allies since the 11 September attacks.

Mr Bush cited the disrupted plans in a speech, designed to boost support for the so-called war on terror.

[. . .]

But the sketchy details provided by the White House make it hard to assess how serious or advanced the plans were.

On further analysis:

John Diamond and Toni Locy, "

By contrast, in December 2005 the UN Refugee Agency noted:

"Some 20,500 refugees returned from Iran and Saudi Arabia with the support of UNHCR. Parallel to the organized return movements, the Iraqi Ministry of Trade recorded the spontaneous return of some 270,000 refugees to Iraq after May 2003."

That's only about 300,000 rather than 1,200,000. In fact, that same UN article states:

"UNHCR estimates that nearly one million Iraqis (of whom some 98,000 are registered refugees) are living in the countries immediately surrounding Iraq, and a further 350,000 Iraqis (of whom 166,000 are registered refugees) are living further afield."

Even assuming that doesn't count the 300,000 already returned, that's only a total of 1.65 million Iraqis residing or formerly residing abroad, of whom the article asserts 75% have returned to Iraq by "the most conservative estimate".

More importantly, though, that doesn't even take into account the reportedly-vast numbers of Iraqis fleeing Iraq. From a report entitled "Iraqi Refugees Overwhelm Syria":

"Syrian officials say 700,000 Iraqis from various ethnic, religious and economic backgrounds have arrived since the U.S.-led invasion, far more than in any other country in the region."

There are several other highly-questionable assertions in the article (e.g., Iraq is again a major oil exporter that will fulfill its OPEC quota of 2.8Mbpd by the end of 2006; the US Department of Energy reports that Iraq doesn't even have an OPEC quota, and is producing at best 2.0Mbpd as of May 2006) and enough politicization and bias that, much as I'd like to believe what the author is saying, "The Real Iraq" is not a credible piece.

The report credited Radio Sawa with attracting a large audience in key Middle East countries but said the station, which has an annual budget of $22 million, has been so preoccupied with building an audience through its music that it has failed to adequately measure whether it is influencing minds.

Two independent panels of Arab-language experts hired by the inspector general's office gave the programming a mixed review, saying it did not match al-Jazeera in terms of quality and that parents would prefer that their teenagers not listen to Radio Sawa because its broadcasts contained such poor Arabic grammar. "Radio Sawa failed to present America to its audience," one panel concluded.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors has vehemently protested the report, questioning its methodology and assumptions in a 49-page pre-publication rebuttal.

American foriegn lanquage skills are notably crappy. Most of our farsi translators are of questionable use in counter insurgency.

According to a recent State Department IG report, Radio Sawa, our pop music and news station aimed at young Arab audiences, has very little influence since parents tell their kids not to listen to it- "because its broadcasts contained such poor Arabic grammar."

Pelosi is never briefed on secret programs since she is not a member of the Intelligence Committees.

Wake up. In October, 2001, Pelosi was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committe. She even wrote to the NSA director following a briefing on these exact programs at that time. If she was so sure that the agency was being directed to do something illegal, her inquiries about it sure weren't phrased that way. And she continued to vote to fund exactly these activities for years following the events that triggered the need. She sat in the room and heard the words "NSA", "telephone records", "database" and all the rest. Perhaps you're suggesting she's too dumb to grasp what was being explained to her? Not the sort of person you want on an intelligence oversight committee, if that's the case.

What kind of oversight is that?

The kind that you, as a congressional representative, vote on. Which she did, and continued to... because even she knows that this area of activity is not just some administration power play, it's the intel agencies' jobs, and leaders of both parties in both the senate and the house were well aware of it, and to this day indicate that they don't want it to stop. Pelosi included. She's just spinning semantics for political traction in other areas.

There are OS X botnets, and although I've never heard of any, I'd be there's probably a few proof of concept Linux botnets hanging out in hacker circles.