The people at StopAbductions.com are refreshingly unconcerned with abductions that, you know, actually happen. Oh, and you’re free to copy their instructions for creating a “Thought Screen Helmet,” if you like. If you make one, I encourage you to wear it at all times so that the rest of us can, um, admire your self-reliance.

Soros, that is. He’s ponied up big bucks to help defeat Bush’s money machine. I think I’ll send him a check.

Just as Diebold. They can’t even keep their web site secure, and they expect us to trust them with our republic?

Today, it’s 101 fun-loving degrees here. That’s the actual air temperature. With the heat index, it’s more like 111.

Every summer, I wonder how many more of these Houston Augusts I can take before I move to someplace temperate, like Atlanta, or Venus.

On the left, a scary scary Liberian. On the right, a scary Librarian.

There is no article about the scary Librarian. Of the Liberian, the less said, the better — though you can be sure I’m terribly glad there’s no reference in the article cited above of them also singing “I Feel Pretty.”

No, really. What time is it? Turns out, nobody really knows.

Not that I think this is a reasonable excuse for anything, mind you.

The WHO is set to release healthy eating guidelines, but not if the sugar lobby has anything to do with it.

No, this isn’t about Chuck Berry. It’s about this guy:

It’s his 28th birthday. Send him a nasty message.

Larry Flynt has a prayer campaign I think we can all appreciate.

Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer?

In the wake of Lawrence v. Texas, plenty of folks have weighed in on the gay marriage issue, not the least of them clergy of various stripes. It therefore comes as no surprise that Rome has something to say, and something loud and bombastic at that. Somehow, they discovered the stones required to insist that allowing gay adoption “does violence” to the children involved.

Presumably, we should take them at their word, since any organization that has made an ongoing practice of covering up its own pedophilia and sexual abuse for decades clearly knows more about violance against children than simple, loving parents. I’m pretty sure we ought not be taking our cues about child care from these guys. How, again, are two loving parents who happen to be the same gender somehow tantamount to violence? Perhaps the real violence here is the idea of leaving one’s children in the care of people who can’t tell abuse from ministry, and shuffle personnel to protect rapists and their own organization rather than accept responsibility for violating a profoundly sacred trust. I’m honestly stunned they think they have any credibility on the issue whatsoever.

Other people saying the same thing include Patrick Nielsen-Hayden ( blog) over at Electrolite, who includes a few other comments as well.

In case you’re just tuning in to this particular bit of judicial tomfoolery, a generally goofy French national named Zacarias Moussaoui has been on trial for quite some time for being, ostensibly, the “20th Man” in the 9/11 plot. Well, I say trial; what’s really happening is that the Jusice Department is being embarrassed by a man everyone thought was crazy as a loon when this whole thing started (an impression fueled in part by his insistence on representing himself).

The worm began to turn, however, when Moussaoui refused to go quietly to what would have been — and still may be — his ultimate doom. The prosecution, citing nebulous “national security” concerns, continues to refuse to allow Mr. Moussaoui to depose their star witness — a witness who may well have exculpatory evidence (essentially, that he was too nutty for Al Queda to trust in the plot). As I sincerely hope we all remember from civics, the right to confront and question the witnesses for the prosecution is a key portion of the judicial process in this country. Accordingly, Justice’s refusal to comply with basic Constitutional law has earned them harsh words from the presiding judge, Leonie Brinkema. In a January 31 ruling, the prosecution was ordered to allow the deposition. They have refused to comply, so next week Judge Brinkema will impose sanctions — which could extend all the way to outright dimissal of the charges.

Of course, if that happens, the government will probably just trot Mr. Moussaoui off to a military tribunal, where the standards are much more lax and appeal isn’t an option — and where the death penalty is virtually assured.

Pay attention, people; these rights have to matter and be honored by our government even when it’s inconvenient for them to be rights at all.

Naval ships have their own post codes.

Sam Phillips, arguably the father of rock and roll, died yesterday in (where else?) Memphis. He was 80.

Phillips started as a DJ, but quickly moved to recording. He opened Memphis Recording Service in 1950, where he recorded many local blues artists — including B.B. King,ÊHowlin’ WolfÊand James Cotton. In March of 1951, he recorded what is generally considered the first rock and roll song, “Rocket 88,” by singer Jackie Brenston and Ike Turner’s band, for Chess Records. By June, it was number one on the R&B chart, and a whole new style of music was taking root.

Phillips’ next venture was the studio that still stands as a tourist attraction today: Sun Records. He founded Sun in 1952, and from there launched the careers of such icons as Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins — and a truck driver from Tupelo named Presley. It was at Sun with Phillips that Elvis recorded his first songs on a summer day in 1954: a single with “That’s All Right” on one side and “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on the other. Phillips stood out in that era not just for producing solid talent, but also for doing so without regard to race despite being firmly in the Jim Crow South.

Phillips was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in its first year (1986), alongside many of the giants he helped produce.

While the stated inspiration for this domain name has little if anything to do with the University of Florida — notwithstanding the allegiance we at NoGators have for the Southeastern Conference — it is encouraging to see them take our credo so seriously.

We’re now apparently kidnapping noncombatants in Iraq.

Col. David Hogg, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, said tougher methods are being used to gather the intelligence. On Wednesday night, he said, his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: “If you want your family released, turn yourself in.” Such tactics are justified, he said, because, “It’s an intelligence operation with detainees, and these people have info.” They would have been released in due course, he added later.

Maryland is busily adopting Diebold’s computerized voting system despite a study showing the system to have massive security problems. The study — by researchers with Johns Hopkins’ Information Security Institute — found numerous problems.

They concluded that the system was so flawed that voters could vote multiple times, that ATM-like “Smart Cards” such as those used in Maryland could easily be copied and that an insider could program the machine to register votes incorrectly.

Are they really just figuring out that computerized voting can be troublesome? As it happens, no:

In 2001, four out of the five members of the technical group that was asked to recommend to the state which electronic voting system to buy instead recommended against buying any at all. The state ignored the advice.

Paper may be old, but at least it’s auditable. More coverage of the same study here.

When you care enough to send the very best, or at least the tackiest, you can use this service.

Now just read this while I go find some rye.

Lance Armstrong won Monday’s Tour de France stage outright, and stretched his lead to a bit more than a minute (1:07) over his closest challenger, 1997 Tour winner Jan Ulrich (second to Armstrong in ’00 and ’01).

Every Tour since 1999 has belonged to the Texan. Tuesday is a rest day; after that, there are five more stages. On Sunday, Armstrong may well equal Miguel Indurain’s record five-in-a-row sweep of the Tour (1991-1995). Three other riders have also won five tours, but not consecutively:

• France’s Jacques Anquetil (1957, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964);
• Belgium’s legendary Eddy Merckx (1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1974); and
• France’s Bernard Hinault (1978, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1985)

The last American to win — before Armstrong — was Greg LeMond, who won three times: in 1986, 1989, and 1990. LeMond is also the only other American to ever win the Tour.

Cross your fingers, dear readers. He may not need it, but it can’t hurt.

Over at the National Review, Maggie Gallagher is insisting that American society will collapse if we allow gay marriage. The logical leaps here are awe inspiring. She closes with this, which is simply mind-boggling:

The future belongs to people who do the hard things necessary to reproduce not only themselves, but their civilization. Marriage is not an option, it is a precondition for social survival. Not everyone lives up to the marriage ideal in this or any civilization. But when a society abandons the marriage idea altogether as a shared public norm, do not expect private individuals to be able to sustain marriage. Winning the gay-marriage debate may be hard, but to those of us who witnessed the fall of Communism, despair is inexcusable and irresponsible. Losing this battle means losing the idea that children need mothers and fathers. It means losing the marriage debate. It means losing limited government. It means losing American civilization. It means losing, period.

Pretty amazing, isn’t it? It’s possible that Gallagher is capable of clear, well-reasoned thought on issues unrelated to homosexuality, but you’d never be able to tell from this piece. I continue to be amazed that the party of “limited government” seems so hot to decide who we can and can’t marry, and is willing to employ such bizarre arguments in the service of this goal.

DirecTV is now suing anybody they can find with SmartCard programming tools, and never mind that the tools are legal and can be used for things that aren’t stealing satellite signals. I hope at least some of these folks have the funds to fight it, and find somebody willing to represent them in a countersuit. They deserve to go down, down, down for this.

Read this.

American Mullah Pat Robertson has come out in support of Liberian President Charles Taylor because “he’s a Christian.” Never mind the child soldiers, the death squads, and the bloodbath he’s presided over — he’s a Christian (and a Baptist!), so we ought to leave him alone.

Er, right, Pat. And this has nothing to do with the $8 million investment you’ve got in Liberian gold, does it? Who takes this bozo seriously?

Two RIAA-stooge lawmakers have proposed a bill to treat online song swapping as a criminal felony. Good thing the FBI and Justice Department have that whole homeland-security thing sewn up; otherwise, I’d wonder about priorities.

Here’s a transcript of Bill Moyers interviewing Jon Stewart on the curious niche the Daily Show occupies. How is it that a comedy program is providing some of the most acute analysis on television?

|| ||

Remember the pools of our childhood? Community pools or private clubs, they all tended to have a shallow end, say three feet, and then gradually increased the depth as one approached the other side. Some of those pools extended to 8, 10, or even 12 feet. High-board diving was a reasonable pursuit at the otherwise unremarkable club where I grew up swimming. But no more: the Deep End is a vanishing thing.

The Justice Department — whose name is becoming uncomfortably Orwellian under Ashcroft — has refused to comply with a judge’s order that they produce one of their witnesses against accused 9/11 accomplice Zacarias Moussaoui so that he may be questioned by the defense (in this case, Moussaoui himself, since he’s going the pro se route). Their excuse is “national security,” but I’m not clear on how that abrogates the right of the accused to confront witnesses. This refusal could open the door for a number of sanctions from the judge, apparently up to and including outright dismissal of the charges against Moussaoui.

In Nevada, a new type of adult entertainment involves men hunting naked women with paintball guns. It costs five to ten grand, so states the article. Somewhat more disturbing:

So why do women agree to strip down and run around the desert dodging paint balls? Nicole says it’s good money. “I mean it’s $2,500 if you don’t get hit. You try desperately not to and it’s $1000 if you do,” said Nicole.

Pat Robertson has started a prayer campaign designed to remove three Justices from the Supreme Court, since they had the unmitigted gall to rule that what goes on between consenting adults in their own bedroom is no business of the state.

In this case, have your own. (via JWZ’s Livejournal)

Not. Apparently, the first sanctioned US online voting will be done from Windows only. Are the folks behind this project even paying attention? There doesn’t exist a version of Windows that isn’t a security nightmare.

On the other hand, if you’re eight, something like this is probably pretty darn cool.

That’s why my dad called comic books — sorry, graphic literature. This guy’s site is a fantastic archive of vintage horror, war, superhero and romance comic covers from the Golden Age of the medium. Excellent coffeebreak fare.

They do nothing for everybody.

Why?

Here’s 101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot. Issue One, at least for me, is reasonable control of popups and naughty scripting right out of the box. Issue Two is actual standards-compliant rendering of HTML (something Redmond would love to quash entirely). Internet Explorer can’t begin to deal with either issue, but Mozilla can — and so can Netscape, which is really just a version of Mozilla in corporate drag. Both are available for any platform IE runs on, and then some.

If you’re not happy with Mozilla/Netscape, which (admittedly) is/are a bit bloated at this point (including as they do a mail program; a news program; an HTML editor; a chat client; etc.), there are other, less-comprehensive, speedier options under the Mozilla project, including Camino (for OS X Macs) and Firebird (still beta, but available for lots of platforms). There are also plenty of other browsers outside the Mozilla family, including Apple’s very nice Safari (OS X only, which is a darn shame), Opera (for almost anything, but costs money), and others (I’m leaving out the whole Linux crowd entirely, but those folks can’t run IE anyway — besides, they have Galeon to play with). Don’t use IE just because you have it. Check out something else, if only to compare.

Really, I have. Someone posted it on the Well, and it’s been in my to-post buffer since like February. So here it is.

According to this,

Several species of caterpillars have developed an interesting system for waste disposal; they fire their fecal pellets a distance of up to 40 times their body length away from their homes, at a speed of 4.2 feet (1.3 meters) per second. The equivalent distance for a 6-foot-tall (1.8 meter) human would be around 240 feet (73 meters).

Presented with no judgement or comment whatsoever, though I’m sure a few of you are thinking “Damn! I wish I could do that!”

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby takes a run at showing how gay marriage hurts heterosexual marriage. He fails, utterly. His main point seems to be that: (1) Vermont has allowed 5,700 “civil unions” between homosexuals; and (2) Of those, 2,000 involve at least one partner who was formerly involved in a traditional marriage. From there, he finds the deep end:

Just a shred – but a jarring one. Of course, it doesn’t mean that Vermont’s civil union law broke up 2,000 straight couples. It does mean that where there used to be 2,000 traditional marriages, there are now 2,000 ruptured ones – and 2,000 gay or lesbian unions in their place. Were some of those marriages doomed from the outset? Probably. But it’s also probable that some of them weren’t. In another time or another state, some of those marriages might have worked out. The old stigmas, the universal standards that were so important to family stability, might have given them a fighting chance. Without them, they were left exposed and vulnerable.

How’s that again? Was there a causal relationship between the availability of de facto gay marriage and the breakup of those 2,000 unions? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t even try to say — to do so, he’d have to consider the time frame; however, he doesn’t even bother to ask how many of them broke up in the months after gay unions were legalized in Vermont. Instead, he commits the sort of error that a freshman statistics student should be ashamed of: he confuses correlation — and weak correlation at that — with causation. I wonder if he thinks that the availability of second (and subsequent) heterosexual marriages weakens initial unions? Should we ban those as well?

It’s time for right-wing closet cases to stop trying to tell people what they can and can’t do, who they can and can’t love, and how they can and can’t fuck. These characters would do well to revisit the documents that form the bedrock of our nation, and note well how the purpose of government in the eyes of the founders was to preserve rights, not restrict them.

Silence of the Lambs. The Musical. (Via BoingBoing)

The new Foo Fighters video for Low has been rejected/banned by MTV. It stars Grohl and Jack Black. That is all I’m willing to say, aside from “ watch this” — you’ll need Real Player.

I love the Onion. This week: “ Bush Asks Congress for $30 Billion to Help Fight War on Criticism.” Spot on.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, the good news is that even our hard-right Supreme Court still admits there’s such a thing as the right to privacy, and struck down Texas’ sodomy law in Lawrence v. Texas — and with it most if not all similar laws nationwide. Predictably, the religious right promptly became hysterical about “protecting marriage,” a point of view perhaps finding its apotheosis in this quote from Colorado-based Focus on Family (James Dobson’s organization, I believe):

“With today’s decision, the court continues pillaging its way through the moral norms of our country,” Mr. Minnery said in an interview. “If the people have no right to regulate sexuality, then ultimately the institution of marriage is in peril, and with it, the welfare of the coming generations of children.” Mr. Minnery said the ruling violates the rights of Texans who can no longer decide “what they find appropriate in terms of sexual behavior.”

A more careful reading of the decision would, I note, point out that Texans are still free to decide this issue for themselves; what they have lost is the legal right to make that decision for others. The right-wing American Center for Law and Justice filed an amicus brief in support of the law; chief counsel Jay Sekulow said “By providing constitutional protection to same-sex sodomy, the Supreme Court strikes a damaging blow for the traditional family and will only intensify the legal battle to protect marriage.” Er, sure, Jay. I’m still trying to understand how B follows A in this picture. (Both quotes from this Washington Times story.)

What confuses me is this: why is it so damned important to these people to keep homosexuals from marrying? Why does that make one’s own marriage, or the idea of marriage, less viable or weaker? What’s the big fucking deal? It’s also pretty important to note that these cannards are pretty far from any legal or Constitutional argument in support of a law that (1) violates Privacy as understood and laid out by Griswold and Roe and (2) has even more blatent equal protection problems (the Texas law prohibited only same-sex sodomy, not sodomy between a heterosexual couple; Justice O’Connor stated that this issue alone was enough to support her ruling).

In their pursuit of hetero-only marriage, would these matrimonial Chicken Littles barter away this right to privacy? Would they allow the government into their own bedrooms to regulate birth control, as Connecticut was doing prior to Griswold? It would seem so; hopefully, the American public will see this for what it is, and make clear that the State has no right to tell them how to fuck.

Anyway, now the bad news — which is really only bad if you thought Bill Frist was any better than his bigoted predecessor. Yesterday Reuters reported that the good Doctor would support a Constitutional admendment banning gay marriage. Look closely at this. Twice in memory the GOP has disliked some SCOTUS ruling, and then tried to patch the Constitution to do an end-run around it — here, on sodomy laws, and prior to this, on flag burning. In both cases — and here’s the part most worth noting — the proposed amendment would take away rights that SCOTUS says the Founders wanted us to have. Make no mistake; this party of less-intrusion and smaller-government actively pursues an agenda contrary to both points in order to pander to the religious right, and the White House is right there with them. Watch these people. They’re the biggest danger our country faces right now. We know the terrorists want to hurt us; at least they’re honest about it.

Don’t know what to wear? Here’s just the thing.

It’s true. I’ve been too busy to attend to this little exercise in public onanism. However, there’s light at the end of the tunnel, and I have reason to believe it’s not just a train.

Until then, I offer this, which I have reason to believe will amuse many of you readers, especially those named Chris (Misters M. and J., this is for you).

…they actually thought they could sell stuff with these flexi-disk jingles. Don’t miss the Schaeffer Beer entry.

All sorts of, um, Unusual Barbies. I’m sure Mattel will sue them forthwith, but enjoy it while it lasts. As a resident of Montrose, I think I find “ Tattoo Artist Barbie” the most amusing.

None of these hold a candle to the “Laura Palmer” Barbie a friend of mine had years ago; she was naked, with blue lips, and wrapped in cellophane.

I mean, if you live in Houston, anyway. Things Are Afoot at KaldiCafe.com.

He doesn’t get on the net much, but would he if he knew there was a whole site devoted to John Green?

“Female Muslim Comic.”

[T]he Sept. 11 terrorist attacks changed everything. Initially, she ceased performing on the logic that this might not be the time for gags about Ramadan or, for that matter, anything funny a Muslim had to offer. Three weeks later, though, she took the stage in a Soho club called Amused Moose and, with a single joke, found the very, very thin line between acceptable comedy and abominable taste: ”My name is Shazia Mirza,” she said. ”At least that’s what it says on my pilot’s license.”

Excellent.