The Feds are prosecuting Forrest County, Mississippi sheriff Billy McGhee for seizing a pair of 18-wheelers full of ice on September 4, in the wake of Katrina. Said 18-wheelers were intended for aid, and the area in question needed aid.
Nice.
Via TPM.
No, really. It’s hard to see as possible with a GOP-controlled congress that refuses to call Bush on his ongoing contempt for the rule of law, but there’s definitely a case for it.
People stop being polite.
Read this to find out. Here’s a tidbit I didn’t know: many if not most are there on scant real evidence, as they were turned over to US forces by rival Afghanis with little or no documentation. Don’t like your neighbor? Tell the Yanks he works for Osama!
The I/O Brush allows you to “paint” with textures, colors, and video from the real world.
Click here.
Go, now, to the current edition, which features gems such as “Rotation Of Earth Plunges Entire North American Continent Into Darkness” and “Modern-Day John Henry Dies Trying To Out-Spreadsheet Excel 11.0.” You will not be sorry.
If you have a long video of a screaming tape player running down zip lines in weird places, people will blog the hell out of that shit.
Because otherwise, the jackasses in charge can get away with crap like this.
Microsoft’s next iteration of Windows will come in SIX versions. We don’t know whose idea this was, but their notion of “clear communication with the marketplace” is pretty jacked up.
This isn’t a simple whistle-blower thing, since the guy in question is an employee of Diebold’s law firm, not Diebold directly, but it still looks pretty shitty.
There’s a company who specialize in, er, nontraditional architectural enhancements whose descriptive website is HiddenPassageway.com.
Perhaps you’d consider pledging it to The Hurtt Prize, dedicated to catching Houston top cop Harold Hurtt doing something — anything — illegal. After all, this is the jackass who said “If you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it” when asked about his proposals for more pervasive police surveillance in Houston.
Ohio state Senator Robert Hagan has found an amusing way to fight bigoted GOP initiatives to bar adoption by gays in his state. (Via MeFi)
“It worked last night on a different asteroid.”
We have no idea if this ad is real or not, but it makes us giggle a lot.
Mike Tyson famously once said something about “fading into Bolivia,” which we like a lot. In the same vein, we dreamed the other night about someone being ineptly described as vicious by saying they “go straight for the juggler.” Awesome.
We’ve been too busy to follow this closely, but what Bruce says makes an awful damn lot of sense.
This guy gets it right.
If you have no idea who that is, well, you probably won’t enjoy this.
Fafblog weighs in on the cartoon controversy. It begins like this, and then gets even better:
“What if it’s not really a picture of Mohammed,” says me, “just a picture of a picture of Mohammed?” “Metablasphemy!” says Giblets. “It is sacrilegious and pretentious!” “What if it just looks like a picture a Mohammed but it’s really a picture a Jesus wearin a real good Mohammed costume?” says me. “Then it is pretend blasphemy,” says Giblets. “God can’t tell the difference. He has to smite you just to make sure.”
(Their follow-up is deliciously pointed as well.)
Go read this. He’s right. Again.
It turns out, at least according to BoingBoing that Google Video allows the uploader to determine what countries may or may not view the file. Ergo, whomever uploaded the IED video decided that USAians need not see it, not Google.
Check out this little comment on Da Mohney and his courting of Mr Denton’s Wild Ride.
Bob Parsons points out they’re trying to control the .COM registry. Forever.
Our cousin, being a jerk and whining about “legislating from the bench.” Either he doesn’t understand the function of the Judiciary, or he’s being deliberately disingenuous for political reasons. As the aforelinked blogger notes, it’s only “legislating from the bench” if you don’t like the ruling.
The appearance — at a rural junior college not far from the Heathen hometown — appears tied to a promo tour for his book on the confirmation process. Pickering refers to it as bitter and partisan, but presumably assumes no blame for resistance to his nomination based on his actual record. We don’t think he’s a racist, but anyone who did work for the Sovereignty Commission — and who wrote memos in support of anti-miscegenation statutes — shouldn’t expect a smooth glide to the appeals bench.
SSH tunneling, because it means we don’t have to trust nefarious hotel wireless networks (though despite the endorsement implied, we didn’t actually use the tool — geeks that we are, we wrote a script).
We totally forgot that there was some big to-do in Houston this weekend, so we were taken by surprise by the degree to which the airport was taken over by rank amateurs. We damn near missed our flight partly due to gawking tourists wholly unaccustomed to airports, cities, security, etc.
Look: if you don’t fly much, at least take the time to check out what the regulations are before you get to the security checkpoint. Wearing metal-accented clothes in an airport is just plain dumb in 2006, people. Ditto on boots that take 10 minutes to take off while the line grows behind you. Know what you have to take off and what you don’t, and plan accordingly. You did just spend 30 minutes in line, didn’t you?
Josh Marshall presents a compelling case that Dick Cheney is a moral coward.
BoingBoing points us to a fascinating tool for comparing the relative value of dollars in different time periods. One of their illustrating examples is pretty cool:
Babe Ruth’s salary in 1932 was $80,000. In 2004 the CPI was 13.8 times larger than it was in 1932 and the GDP deflator 12 times larger. This means that if we are interested in Ruth’s purchasing power of housing or meals, then he was “earning” the equivalence of about $1,000,000 today. The relative cost of (unskilled) labor is 42 times higher in 2004 than in 1932. So if we wanted to compare his wage to what someone selling hot dogs would earn, we could say his “relative wage” is $3,400,000. GDP per capita and GDP are 80 and 200 times larger in 2004 than they were in 1932. Thus Ruth’s earnings relative to the average output would be $6,230,000 today. Finally, as a share of GDP, Ruth “output” that year would be $16,000,000 in today’s money.
… then go read this. It’s entirely likely that you’ve never actually had the good stuff. We think a quest is in order. (Via BoingBoing and Warren Ellis simultaneously.)
We received a concerned email in re: the “Mac virus” that’s floating around. Here’s our reply:
From: [king heathen] Subject: Re: what about this mac virus mary's telling me about? Date: February 17, 2006 8:32:32 PM CST To: [co-worker] > On Feb 17, 2006, at 8:07 PM, [coworker] wrote: > what do I need to know / do? 1. If people try to send you files with iChat that you're not expecting, don't accept them. 2. If you do accept them, don't uncompress them. 3. If you do accept them and uncompress them, don't execute the contents by double-clicking the file. 4. If you do accept them and uncompress them and double-click the contents, don't type your admin password. 5. If you do accept them and uncompress them and double-click the contents and type your admin password, well, then you'll be infected, and the trojan will try to spread itself. It doesn't do anything else, but it will be annoying. Summary? It requires so much intervention from the user to get installed and run that it's only barely a trojan. Since it's so lame in those terms AND has no destructive payload, it's pretty much a non-event.
There more here if you want.
How ’bout some of these Russian Roulette Chocolates anyway?
Apparently, the Houston Police chief wants to deploy an awful lot of surveillance cameras on private property.
Look what Screenhead found when they tried a link for an Iraqi weapons-cache explosion:
Here’s something you may need if you have a hankerin’ to code Perl in latin.
Polar bears encounter a submarine. This has been in our email forever, but these shots by Captain Myron Balchin Sr of the Los Angeles-class fast attack submarine USS Honolulu are still worth a look.
Warren Ellis and Joss Whedon do a little back-and-forth in Ellis’ comments section. Enjoy.
More evidence we’re living in the future. Key quote: “Roomba’s coming out tonight. Clean up your toys or Roomba will eat them!”
Check this out, and stick with it. The dude has got no mercy. Seriously. (Local copy, in case that one goes away someday.)
Via BoingBoing. Rep. Lantos grills Yahoo on their bullshit behavior in China.
“http://www.screenhead.com/funny/the-norwegian-blue/might-as-well-jump-the-shark-155461.php“
Sigh. Pathetic. Just pathetic. If it’s all above board, look into it. It sure LOOKS illegal, though, and that merits inquiry. Let’s hope the House isn’t as neutered.
Van Halen will follow INXS and pick their new singer with a TV show. At least Screehead leaves us with some choice samples from their heyday — TWENTY FIVE YEARS AGO.
Cheney has asserted that he has the authority to declassify information.
Setting aside for a moment that no statute grants him this power, consider the implications for the Plame affair if it’s true. Could Cheney have declassified Plame’s status before leaking it? Would that make it legal (if, perhaps, even more reprehensible)?
Go check out what happened in Cincinnati. (Via MeFi.)