Disney is buying Marvel.

On this day in 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

Texas may well be about to admit that when it — scratch that; WE — executed Cameron Todd Willingham in 2004 for murder-by-arson after a 1991 house fire killed his three children, the state was actually murdering an innocent man.

In a withering critique, a nationally known fire scientist has told a state commission on forensics that Texas fire investigators had no basis to rule a deadly house fire was an arson — a finding that led to the murder conviction and execution of Cameron Todd Willingham.

The finding comes in the first state-sanctioned review of an execution in Texas, home to the country’s busiest death chamber. If the commission reaches the same conclusion, it could lead to the first-ever declaration by an official state body that an inmate was wrongly executed.

Indeed, the report concludes there was no evidence to determine that the December 1991 fire was even set, and it leaves open the possibility the blaze that killed three children was an accident and there was no crime at all — the same findings found in a Chicago Tribune investigation of the case published in December 2004.

Willingham, the father of those children, was executed in February 2004. He protested his innocence to the end.

More:

Among Beyler’s key findings: that investigators failed to examine all of the electrical outlets and appliances in the Willinghams’ house in the small Texas town of Corsicana, did not consider other potential causes for the fire, came to conclusions that contradicted witnesses at the scene, and wrongly concluded Willingham’s injuries could not have been caused as he said they were.

The state fire marshal on the case, Beyler concluded in his report, had “limited understanding” of fire science. The fire marshal “seems to be wholly without any realistic understanding of fires and how fire injuries are created,” he wrote.

The marshal’s findings, he added, “are nothing more than a collection of personal beliefs that have nothing to do with science-based fire investigation.”

Over the past five years, the Willingham case has been reviewed by nine of the nation’s top fire scientists — first for the Tribune, then for the Innocence Project, and now for the commission. All concluded that the original investigators relied on outdated theories and folklore to justify the determination of arson.

Even better: the fact that the “experts” who called it arson were full of shit was apparently clear to anyone looking into the facts in plenty of time to save this man’s life. Governor Perry ignored those facts. Thanks, Goodhair! Way to go!

Somebody get Colbert.

This NYT story (nogators/nogators gets you in) has some real gems. Twenty-odd years ago, when I camped some, I knew that the right thing to do with food on a campsite was get it out of reach:

[C]ampers often stored food in bags, typically hung from cables slung between trees, which inadvertently made for one-stop shopping for bears.

“They had learned that when they saw a bag in the air, there had to be a rope someplace and they learned to bite or slice the line,” said Neil Woodworth, executive director of the Adirondack Mountain Club, a conservation and recreation group.

That alone is pretty cool, but it gets better. Now there’s a company that makes “bear-proof” canisters that are apparently sort of like giant child-proof medicine bottles. They worked for a while, until one Adironback bear figured them out.

No, I’m not making this up.

The BearVault 500 withstood the ravages of the test bears at the Folsom City Zoo in California. It has stymied mighty grizzlies weighing up to 1,000 pounds in the backcountry of Yellowstone National Park.

But in one corner of the Adirondacks, campers started to notice that the BearVault, a popular canister designed to keep food and other necessities safe, was being compromised. First through circumstantial evidence, then from witness reports, it became clear that in most cases, the conqueror was a relatively tiny, extremely shy middle-aged black bear named Yellow-Yellow.

Some canisters fail in the testing stage when large bears are able to rip off the lid. But wildlife officials say that Yellow-Yellow, a 125-pound bear named for two yellow ear tags that help wildlife officials keep tabs on her, has managed to systematically decipher a complex locking system that confounds even some campers.

Also, apparently Yellow-Yellow now has apprentices.

This is both very cool and mildly menacing.

Two bits:

• Fully 25% of all music sold last year came from the iTunes Music Store. That’s in unit sales, not dollars, but it’s still a huge stat. More here.

• The most popular camera on Flickr is the iPhone. The old champ? Canon’s entry-level DSLR, which is also the official DSLR of Heathen Central.

Check out what the Sydney Morning Herald has to say about the new Burquini.

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey pens an anti-Obamacare oped in the WSJ. Madcap hilarity ensues.

Regardless of one’s stance on the health care debate, publicly taking a position so incredibly contrary to his core customer demographic is a pretty bizarre and stupid move.

UPDATE: Whole Foods deleted the thread I linked to in “ensues” above. Nice.

That’s pretty much the only take-away I can think of when faced with his plan to charge for access to any of his news websites by next summer.

Study: Abstinence-Only Lunch Programs Ineffective At Combating Teen Obesity.

I’m completely flummoxed that people — cops, their apologists — are in any way offended by what the President said about the Gates arrest.

The quote, for reference:

Now, I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.

Obama continued:

As you know, Lynn, when I was in the state legislature in Illinois, we worked on a racial profiling bill because there was indisputable evidence that blacks and Hispanics were being stopped disproportionately. And that is a sign, an example of how, you know, race remains a factor in the society. That doesn’t lessen the incredible progress that has been made. I am standing here as testimony to the progress that’s been made. And yet the fact of the matter is, is that, you know, this still haunts us. And even when there are honest misunderstandings, the fact that blacks and Hispanics are picked up more frequently and often time for no cause casts suspicion even when there is good cause.

There is absolutely no room for offense on any of this.

• Obama Assertion 1: Any of us would be angry in Gates’ situation. You bet.
• Obama Assertion 2: The Cambridge cops “acted stupidly.” That’s also a no-brainer. After ascertaining that Gates was in fact in his own home, they arrested him for being angry with their behavior, essentially. It doesn’t matter what he said, or how he said it. They put him in cuffs and — this is priceless — “secured his cane” before taking him downtown on charges they knew good and well wouldn’t stick, and they did it because they didn’t like what Gates said. That’s stupid behavior.
• Obama Assertion 3: There is not a level playing field between whites and minorities when it comes to police interaction. It’s hard to imagine anyone would argue this point, either.

Gates was in his home. Cops were jackasses. Gates got loud. Cops acted stupidly. End of story. If you’re trying to make hay with this in the press as though Obama hurt your feelings, you’re just as much of a jackass as the cop who cuffed an old man in his own home on trumped-up charges.

Ottawa authorities just discovered what happens when you leave a blank square on a roadside attraction sign.

Harvard prof Henry Louis Gates discovered how evolved we’ve all become on Thursday when he was arrested for breaking and entering.

At his own house.

After proving to police that it was his house.

I don’t give a rat’s ass if he was yelling at the cops. If the police show up on a B&E tip and discover you live in the house in question, they should apologize profusely and go the fuck away. Arresting him should not have even been an option, regardless of what he said.

The Nobel laureate has left the Southern Baptist Church over its treatment of women.

Actually, no, really. Jackson will be buried sans nogginfruit for forensic reasons.

Make up your own joke.

It turns out, some folks have noticed just exactly how awful the name is for the Gazprom-Nigera joint venture, but nobody expects them to rebrand.

Madcap hilarity is more or less inevitable now.

The Onion, on Michael Jackson:

King Of Pop Dead At 12

LOS ANGELES—Michael Jackson, a talented child performer known for his love of amusement park rides and his hobby of collecting exotic animals for his Neverland Ranch, died from sudden cardiac arrest Thursday at the age of 12. The prepubescent singer, who enjoyed playing dress-up and often referred to himself as “the King of Pop,” was celebrated for his naïve exuberance and his generosity toward other children. “This is a terrible loss for music and for all of us,” brother Jermaine Jackson said. “He had so much potential to blossom into a gracious and mature human being. As it is, the world will never know the genius Michael Jackson might have become had he grown up.” The singer leaves behind a large body of hits, 25,000 unopened toys, and nearly $400 million of debt.

Courtesy of Agent L.McHorne:

Gazprom seals $2.5bn Nigeria deal

Russia’s energy giant Gazprom has signed a $2.5bn (£1.53bn) deal with Nigeria’s state operated NNPC, to invest in a new joint venture.

The new firm, to be called Nigaz, is set to build refineries, pipelines and gas power stations in Nigeria.

(Aunt Nel).

Farrah Fawcett, icon of the 70s, adorner of countless teenage walls, is dead.

More disturbing: It turns out she was only 7 years younger than my mom.

A British study found that, while media people drank the most, they only beat people in IT by the slimmest of margins. Duh.

David Carradine: DEAD. In a Bangkok hotel room. Later, when I have more time, I’ll relate the tale of how I ended up in a hotel bar in Austin late one Sunday night, working, when Carradine and his entourage came in, took over the piano, and played light jazz standards for three hours.

In their rush to condemn President Obama’s trip to the mideast as “pandering” and “appeasing,” they’ll completely fail to realize the difference having people actually like us will make when it comes to terrorism.

An American president getting a standing ovation from a Cairo crowd is kind of a big deal. He didn’t say anything earthshaking, or that most Americans wouldn’t agree with immediately. It’s not controversial (among rational people, at least) to point out that we are not in fact at war with Islam, or that Islamic people have rights, or that we understand that not all Muslims are terrorists (just as not all evangelicals are murdering jackasses).

Saying this in public — and saying this in public in the mideast in particular — is an excellent step towards mending fences. Mending fences with the Muslim world is a good idea, since it’s misdirected rage that leads disaffected and directionless types into the thrall of men like Bin Laden. Bombing more isn’t going to help. Talking, though, may just.

Pew Research wonders if you’ve been paying attention.

“The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists.”

DoIHavePigFlu.com?

The implications of the recently released torture memos are fairly deep and significant, but the press at large isn’t boiling it down or providing any real analysis. Fortunately, at least one person is paying attention. Paul Krugman breaks it down for you thusly:

Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.

There’s a word for this: it’s evil.

Not much more to say about it, is there? Our government, working in our name, tortured people to get them to admit to things that weren’t true to justify a war unrelated to the assault we suffered on 9/11. And thus far utterly no one has been held accountable.

For about seven and a half billion.

It’s that time of year again. The Washington Post’s annual peep diorama contest is always fun, but this year the winner is completely over the top. (Via Mrs Heathen.)

Two from Jeffrey McManus.

First:

The AP’s power used to flow from their role as a syndicator — they would hook up any member newsroom with a communications cable (the literal “news wire”) through which stories and other content would flow. Now that newsrooms (and every single other person on the planet) has a better wire called the internet, there may be no good reason for the AP to exist in its role as a syndicator, except for inertia. To put it in economic terms, it is a classic example of an inefficient marketplace.

Second:

the AP’s chairman decried the practice of aggregators linking to and excerpting AP content and got into some rather nasty name-calling (backed up by a Wall Street Journal executive who referred to “certain web sites” (cough Google) as “parasites”). Danny Sullivan had an excellent response in which he suggested that if the news services didn’t want Google’s attention, they’ve always had a simple way to reject it (through a file that bans search engines called robots.txt). But they won’t do this, of course, which is the reason why they’re now resorting to public whining and name-calling — it’s all they’ve got left. Traditional news businesses are stuck in a bear trap called the internet, and they can’t decide whether to saw their own legs off or slowly bleed to death.

See ya, AP.

Adults who love each other can now get married in Iowa no matter what plumbing they have.

From the unanimous Iowa supreme court ruling:

“We are firmly convinced that the exclusion of gay and lesbian people from the institution of civil marriage does not substantially further any important governmental objective,” the court said in an opinion written by Justice Mark Cady. “The legislature has excluded a historically disfavored class of persons from a supremely important civil institution without a constitutionally sufficient justification.”

How about a cool tat made of nanotech ink that changes color to indicate blood sugar?

The Obamas will use neither nonprofit funds nor government money — the usual paths — to renovate the White House residence; instead, they’ll pay for it themselves.

The extremely smart and usually right Clay Shirky breaks down the newspaper problem for you. Hint: Unless they realize what business they’re actually in — which is to say, not selling paper — they’ll die. The digital world has brought changes that are unavoidably destructive to the old way of doing business as a newspaper, which depended on it being hard to duplicate and distribute information. There’s no way to undo that, and there’s absolutely no sane reason to want to.

But, as recent events have shown, no newspaper firm yet understands this, and so they continue to fail, fail again, and fail some more, all the while refusing to alter their business plans — and while this is happening, good people are being put out of work as a direct result of the failure of management vision.

Remember, the railroads weren’t broken by the automobile. They were broken by the mistaken belief they were in the railroad business. What their customers wanted was transportation; how the package moves from St Louis to Denver is completely irrelevant to the customer.

Get pulled over with a lot of cash? The cops might just decide to take it even if you’re not charged with any crime. Leaving aside raging due process concerns, law enforcement organizations get to keep a substantial portion of the property they seize in this way, which gives them an incentive to steal such assets when they think they can get away with it — which may or may not be the same thing as “when they think it’s actually evidence of illegality.”

I think we can also be safe saying that people with access to and experience with white-collar banking services are unlikely to use twenty large in cash to buy a car (e.g.), so the folks caught by seizure-hungry cops are going to tend to be poorly educated and from the lower strata of society — which makes them easier targets, since they’re correspondingly less likely to fight the seizures in court. Nice.

Jackson stops enforcement with red-light cameras:

Mississippi’s capital city will stop issuing tickets and collecting fines when automatic cameras snap pictures of vehicles running red lights, city attorney Sarah O’Reilly Evans says.

The change in Jackson is being made immediately, even though a new state law sets an Oct. 1 deadline for the cameras to be taken down in the only two cities already using them – Jackson and Columbus.

“We don’t think it’s appropriate to have a magazine called Modern Drunkard dictate how we make our whiskey.”

Pope Ratz has declared that condoms make the AIDS problem worse, not better.

The Pope courted further controversy on his first trip to Africa today by declaring that condoms were not a solution to the Aids epidemic – but were instead part of the problem.

In his first public comments on condom use, the pontiff told reporters en route to Cameroon that Aids “is a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, and that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems”.

Pope Benedict has previously stressed that the Roman Catholic Church is in the forefront of the battle against Aids. The Vatican encourages sexual abstinence to fight the spread of the disease.

After his election as Pope, Benedict described Aids as a “a cruel epidemic which not only kills but seriously threatens the economic and social stability of the continent”, but reiterated the Vatican ban on the use of condoms.

Christ. Talk about absurd adherence to dogma.

Billionaire # 701 on the Forbes list? Mexican cocaine kingpin Joaquin Guzman Loera.

Note that while they’re totally open about his income source, they also dutifully categorize his industry as “shipping.”

Two Pennsylvania judges are now going to prison for taking in excess of two million dollars in kickbacks over a five year period in exchange for increasing the headcount at private juvenile facilities.

Ciavarella, 58, along with Conahan, 56, corruptly and fraudulently “created the potential for an increased number of juvenile offenders to be sent to juvenile detention facilities,” federal court documents alleged. Children would be placed in private detention centers, under contract with the court, to increase the head count. In exchange, the two judges would receive kickbacks.

The Juvenile Law Center said it plans to file a class-action lawsuit this week representing what they say are victims of corruption. Juvenile Law Center attorneys cite a few examples of harsh penalties Judge Ciavarella meted out for relatively petty offenses:

• Ciavarvella sent 15-year-old Hillary Transue to a wilderness camp for mocking an assistant principal on a MySpace page. (Emph. added)

• He whisked 13-year-old Shane Bly, who was accused of trespassing in a vacant building, from his parents and confined him in a boot camp for two weekends.

This is brilliant; check it out:

Short of opening a Radio Shack in an Amish town, Dubai is the world’s worst business idea, and there isn’t even any oil. Imagine proposing to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an anathema. This is effectively the proposition that created Dubai – it was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is dangerous.

Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the worst of both the West and the Middle-East and a dangerous totem for those who would mistakenly interpret this as the de facto product of a secular driven culture.

The opening shot of this clip shows 200 skyscrapers that were built in the last 5 years. It looks like Manhattan except that it isn’t the place that made Mingus or Van Allen or Kerouac or Wolf or Warhol or Reed or Bernstein or any one of the 1001 other cultural icons from Bob Dylan to Dylan Thomas that form the core spirit of what is needed, in the absence of extreme toleration of vice, to infuse such edifices with purpose and create a self-sustaining culture that will prevent them crumbling into the empty desert that surrounds them.

Microsoft is getting into the retail store business, and has hired a Wal-Mart exec to lead the effort; the move is heralded as “taking a page out of Apple’s playbook,” and that’s almost certainly what they think they’re doing — after all, Apple has had a great deal of success with its stylish brand-enhancing shops.

This is baffling on a number of levels (timing for one), but the biggest head-scratcher is why they think anyone would go to a Redmond-owned store to buy any MS product. Apple stores work because Apple kit is perceived as stylish, hip, interesting, and desirable on levels unconnected with mundane IT concerns. There are plenty of legitimate technical reasons to prefer the Mac platform, both in terms of hardware and software, but those are secondary, I think, to the appeal of the stores.

Apple also offers a unity of design and function as well as a delightful marriage of hardware and software that Microsoft simply can’t match (this “we make both” angle is a nontrivial aspect to Mac reliability). Microsoft, on the other hand, has a broad and confusing suite of products, but doesn’t sell any computers at all unless you count the XBox.

Further, Apple enjoys tremendous channel control; it’s next to impossible to buy a new Mac for much less than retail, so a buyer doesn’t hurt themselves financially by doing their deal at an Apple store vs. ordering online. Microsoft’s gear and software, on the other hand, is traditionally deeply discounted by resellers, and MS won’t be able to compete with or undercut those prices without poisoning their own channel. End result: High prices at MS retail, lower prices at Amazon, and no crowds at the shops.

Sony, Dell, and Gateway all tried to do the retail thing, and unless I’m wholly incorrect none of them managed (or have managed) to make the shops interesting from a financial perspective. Nobody ever stood in line for anything these guys made, and the same is true for Microsoft. IT managers herald the next rev of Exchange Server, sure, and those stung by Vista await Windows 7 with cautious optimism, but none of those guys are going to stand in line for their upgrades.

Look for the Microsoft stores to be awkward, weird, and without obvious charm — which is more or less what happens every time MS apes something someone else did without understanding why the other party was successful.

Grandstanding douchebag Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott has arrested 8 in a quest to charge Michael Phelps in connection with candid party pictures appearing to show him smoking pot.

In a guns-drawn raid on college kids,

deputies seized four laptop computers, a desktop computer and a computer storage drive from his client’s home — supposedly to try to find evidence against Phelps, Harpootlian said, adding they refused his request Wednesday to return the items to his client.

This over a case that is, at best, simple possession, a misdemeanor in South Carolina (and nearly every other state as well).

Nice.

At the uber-elite TED conference during his presentation on the eradication of malaria, he did something fantastic:

“Malaria is spread by mosquitoes,” Gates said while opening a jar onstage at the Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference — a gathering known to attract technology kings, politicians, and Hollywood stars.

“I brought some. Here I’ll let them roam around. There is no reason only poor people should be infected.”

Of course, the mosquitos released at TED weren’t malarial vectors, but the point was made, and I suspect he had everyone’s attention for the remainder of his talk.

FanTAStic.

(Note: I thought this was already posted back on the 5th, but here it is in the “drafts” box. Oops.)

In an unprecedented space collision, a commercial Iridium communications satellite and a defunct Russian satellite ran into each other Tuesday above northern Siberia, creating a cloud of wreckage, officials said today.

Was this event (a) sort of inevitable or (b) bizarrely unlikely?

There are apparently now bars in the world wherein one may order a “Captain Sullenberger,” which consists of two shots of Grey Goose vodka and a splash of water, shaken.

This is indescribably fantastic.

The Catholic Church is selling indulgences again.

If you give empowered people the additional power of seizing goods without a burden of proof, eventually you get situations like this:

TENAHA — A two-decade-old state law that grants authorities the power to seize property used in a crime is wielded by some agencies against people who are never charged with, much less convicted, of a crime.

Law enforcement authorities in this East Texas town of 1,000 people seized property from at least 140 motorists between 2006 and 2008, and, to date, filed criminal charges against fewer than half, according to a San Antonio Express-News review of court documents.

Virtually anything of value was up for grabs: cash, cell phones, personal jewelry, a pair of sneakers, and often, the very car that was being driven through town. Some affidavits filed by officers relied on the presence of seemingly innocuous property as the only evidence that a crime had occurred.

Linda Dorman, a great-grandmother from Akron, Ohio, had $4,000 in cash taken from her by local authorities when she was stopped while driving through town after visiting Houston in April 2007. Court records make no mention that anything illegal was found in her van and show no criminal charges filed in the case. She is still waiting for the return of what she calls “her life savings.”

Dorman’s attorney, David Guillory, calls the roadside stops and seizures in Tenaha “highway piracy,” undertaken by a couple of law enforcement officers whose agencies get to keep most of what is seized.

This is robbery, plain and simple, and the officers involved should be charged as such, or at least held personally liable together with the state. Seizing property without a conviction is simply obscene, and will lead to abuses like these no matter what supposed “safeguards” lawmakers try to incorporate.

(HT: Cathy.)

They’re trying to suggest to survivors that they may be liable for a dead parent’s debt — apparently as a matter of policy.

Paul Kelleher: Yes, I’m calling to inform you that my mom died on the 24th of January.

Bank of America Estates representative: I’m sorry. Oh, it looks like she never even missed a payment. That’s too bad. Well, how are you planning to take care of her balance?

PK: I’m not going to. She has no estate to speak of, but you should feel free to just go through the standard probate procedure. I’m certainly not legally obligated to pay for her.

BOA: You mean you’re not going to help her out?

PK: I wouldn’t be helping her out — she’s dead. I’d be helping you out.

BOA: Oh, that’s really not the way to look at it. I know that if it were my mother, I’d pay it. That’s why we’re in the banking crisis we’re in: banks having to write off defaulted loans.

The rep’s apparent intention, as Kelleher described it, was to mislead him into believing that he was obligated — at first legally, then, failing that, morally — to cover his mother’s debt (which, in any case, was not large: she had had a $1000 limit on her card). Of course, Kelleher was sophisticated enough to know that’s not true. But how many other less savvy callers in similar situations, he wondered, might respond to the rep’s breezy “how are you planning to take care of her balance?,” with a confused “I guess I’ll mail in a check”?

Wow. Classy move, BofA. Remind me to start using you oh, NEVER.

They’ve dropped Michael Phelps.

The Agitator puts this in context, and reminds us that the Onion was on this kind of thing 11 years ago.

Here’s the response to the absurd “EX-masturbator” shirts from yesterday.

Via Making Light, we find this nearly perfect encapsulation of modern American non-think. The author explains:

I wrote these principles after reflecting on the content of contemporary newspapers and broadcast media and why that content disquieted me. I saw that I was not disturbed so much by what was written or said as I was by what is not. The tacit assumptions underlying most popular content reflect a worldview that is orthogonal to reality in many ways. By reflecting this skewed weltanschauung, the media reinforces and propagates it.

I call this worldview the American Cargo Cult, after the real New Guinea cargo cults that arose after the second world war. There are four main points, each of which has several elaborating assumptions. I really do think that most Americans believe these things at a deep level, and that these misbeliefs constantly underlie bad arguments in public debate.

His outline is simple, clear, and almost completely right as far as I can tell. He begins with:

I. Ignorance is innocence

Complicated explanations are suspect

The world is simple, and there must be a simple explanation for everything.

Certainty is strength, doubt is weakness

Admitting alternatives is undermining one’s own belief.

Changing one’s mind means one has wasted the time spent holding the prior opinion.

Your opinion matters as much as anyone else’s

When a person has studied a topic, he has no more real knowledge than you do, just a hidden agenda.

Hey, I said it was probably true, not likely to cause you to think kindly on your fellow man.