All you need’s the quote: “[T]hey are going to have to pry this vibrator from my cold, dead hand.”

Lake-dwelling, brain-eating amoeba blamed for 6 deaths. “Once infected, most people have little chance of survival. Some drugs have stopped the amoeba in lab experiments, but people who have been attacked rarely survive.”

(Link fixed)

Check out the story of Pedro Zapeta, who saved $59K, only to have the Feds snatch it and refuse to give it back, presumably on the ground that hey, he’s South American — must be a drug mule!

Jesus. Zapeta made errors — he’s illegal, and was unaware of the $10K cash issue — but the way our government is treating him is absurd and grotesque. He worked hard for his money, and now the only way he has any hope of getting it back depends on the pro bono kindness of strangers. Here’s a great bit:

Robert Gershman, one of Zapeta’s attorneys, said federal prosecutors later offered his client a deal: He could take $10,000 of the original cash seized, plus $9,000 in donations as long as he didn’t talk publicly and left the country immediately.

Zapeta said, “No.” He wanted all his money. He’d earned it, he said.

So, pregnant woman has coverage with Blue Cross in Kansas City. Said woman endures the heartbreak of a miscarriage. Said insurance company denies the claim on the grounds that “elective abortion” isn’t covered.

Woman verifies with hospital that the paperwork was coded correctly, and then discovers that, apparently, this branch of Blue Cross routinely denies coverage for miscarriages on these grounds. Shades of Rainmaker, anyone?

We’re hoping Consumerist stays on top of this, and that the actual media get involved soon.

The idea that Maureen McCormick and Eve Plumb had a fling during the Brady Bunch years.

Click through for photographic snarkiness.

The Telcos would like very much to be legally immunized against any lawsuit related to their ongoing violations of pretty much every privacy law on the books at the behest of the Feds.

Raytheon has helpfully created a pain gun, and carry around a tabletop version (presumably for the gom jabbar) at trade shows.

Its makers claim this infernal machine is the modern face of warfare. It has a nice, friendly sounding name, Silent Guardian.

I am told not to call it a ray-gun, though that is precisely what it is (the term “pain gun” is maybe better, but I suppose they would like that even less).

And, to be fair, the machine is not designed to vaporise, shred, atomise, dismember or otherwise cause permanent harm.

But it is a horrible device nonetheless, and you are forced to wonder what the world has come to when human ingenuity is pressed into service to make a thing like this.

Silent Guardian is making waves in defence circles. Built by the U.S. firm Raytheon, it is part of its “Directed Energy Solutions” programme.

What it amounts to is a way of making people run away, very fast, without killing or even permanently harming them.

That is what the company says, anyway. The reality may turn out to be more horrific.

I tested a table-top demonstration model, but here’s how it works in the field.

A square transmitter as big as a plasma TV screen is mounted on the back of a Jeep.

When turned on, it emits an invisible, focused beam of radiation – similar to the microwaves in a domestic cooker – that are tuned to a precise frequency to stimulate human nerve endings.

It can throw a wave of agony nearly half a mile.

[…]

One thing is certain: not just the Silent Guardian, but weapons such as the Taser, the electric stun-gun, are being rolled out by Britain’s police forces as the new way of controlling people by using pain.

And, as the Raytheon chaps all insist, you always have the option to get out of the way (just as you have the option to comply with the police officer’s demands and not get Tasered).

But there is a problem: mission creep. This is the Americanism which describes what happens when, over time, powers or techniques are used to ends not stated or even imagined when they were devised.

With the Taser, the rules in place in Britain say it must be used only as an alternative to the gun. But what happens in ten or 20 years if a new government chooses to amend these rules?

It is so easy to see the Taser being used routinely to control dissent and pacify – as, indeed, already happens in the U.S.

And the Silent Guardian? Raytheon’s Mac Jeffery says it is being looked at only by the “North American military and its allies” and is not being sold to countries with questionable human rights records.

Note the bold last bit. We reckon the use of torture and black sites by our own government means that at least some “questions” have been raised about the U.S.’s own human rights record, but presumably this doesn’t trouble the Raytheon boys in the least. How long before some Cheney disciple decides it’s even safer than waterboarding, and figures he’ll use it to interrogate supposedly “high value” detainees?

(Via MeFi.)

Thanks to global warming, there is now a Northwest Passage.

It’s easy to understand why the GOP is opposed to this, since DC — which is, by the way, bigger in population than Montana — tilts to the Democratic side of things, but it’s getting harder to understand why they should continue to be denied a voice in Congress.

From the NYT story on their new video download service, i.e. what they’re doing because Apple wouldn’t follow their stupid ideas:

NBC makes many of its popular shows available online in streaming media, which means that fans can watch episodes on their computers. Under the new NBC service, called NBC Direct, consumers will be able to download, for no fee, NBC programs like “Heroes,” “The Office” and “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” on the night that they are broadcast and keep them for seven days. They would also be able to subscribe to shows, guaranteeing delivery each week.

But the files, which would be downloaded overnight to home computers, would contain commercials that viewers would not be able to skip through. And the file would not be transferable to a disk or to another computer.

The files would degrade after the seven-day period and be unwatchable. “Kind of like ‘Mission: Impossible,’ only I don’t think there would be any explosion and smoke,” Mr. Gaspin said.

The programs will initially be downloadable only to PCs with the Windows operating system, but NBC said it planned to make the service available to Mac computers and iPods later.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. “Hey, let’s pull our material from the most popular online store EVAR and go our own way with a single-platform option that expires! Consumers will LOVE it!” Really? We don’t think so.

There’s more from Jeffrey McManus over at his site; here’s a great point:

Here’s the bit the writer really screwed up, though: the terms under which NBC wants to “sell” you videos are not just worse than iTunes, but worse than every single video delivery system that has ever existed.

Slick move, boys. Here’s something you should pay attention to: as we’ve said before, the more you make your programming hard to get to, or hard to use like a paying customer wants, the more likely you are simply encouraging folks to seek out the darknets and illegal copies. “Piracy” rates in the UK and Australia for first-run US programming are huge not because they’re all scofflaws, but because that’s the only way they can get crap like “Heroes.” Make it hard to get in the US, and you’ll have the same issue here.

Slacktivist says everything that needs to be said about OJ’s sudden reappearance in our national dialog.

The newest addition to the lamebrain gabfest The View makes Elizabeth Hasselbeck look smart: It appears Sherri Shepherd categorically dismisses evolution and isn’t sure if the world is flat or round.

Ladies and gentlemen, we remind you that Idiocracy is a documentary.

Nearly seven years ago, we started this project in online onanism.

This post — complete with this link to some random internet weirdness — represents something of a milestone, then, as it is the 5,000th such bit of masturbatory ephemera. Enjoy.

(The number above is last night’s total, not a live count.)

Disgruntled voter puts Belgium up for sale

How can you NOT giggle at this sentence?

Hindu hardliners say the project will destroy what they say is a bridge built by Ram and his army of monkeys.

Via MeFi, and from this BBC story.

When David Shepherd and Travis Price saw the new kid in their school being victimized by bullies for wearing a pink shirt, the decided they’d do something about it.

The next day, they handed out hundreds of pink tank tops to as many students as they could, including the bullied new kid, specifically to infuriate, annoy, and marginalize the bullies. It worked.

“The bullies got angry,” said Travis. “One guy was throwing chairs (in the cafeteria). We’re glad we got the response we wanted.”

David said one of the bullies angrily asked him whether he knew pink on a male was a symbol of homosexuality.

He told the bully that didn’t matter to him and shouldn’t to anyone.

“Something like the colour of your shirt or pants, that’s ridiculous,” he said.

“Our intention was to stand up for this kid so he doesn’t get picked on.”

Travis said the bullies “keep giving us dirty looks, but we know we have the support of the whole student body.

Reason points us to the sad tale of Erasmo Palacios, as reported in the Sun-Times. Basically, it’s yet another tale of gross police misconduct coupled with yet another tale of property seizure for no good reason:

It was Rocio Palacios who first noticed the woman who appeared to need help.

It was 8 a.m. when she and her husband, Erasmo, dropped their 6-year-old daughter off at school and had picked up their 22-year-old daughter to go out for breakfast when they saw the woman waving her arms at 53rd Street and Kedzie Avenue last November.

The Palacioses, of Chicago, claim the woman approached their car, parked outside Manolo’s restaurant, leaned in to the passenger side where Rocio was sitting and asked Erasmo if he wanted oral sex for $20 or sex for $25.

The couple laughed, realizing this wasn’t a woman in distress after all.

But within seconds, Chicago police swarmed the family car, hauling Erasmo Palacios out in handcuffs. He was charged with solicitation of a prostitute

[…]

Eight hours later, Palacios, who has no criminal record, was released from custody. And weeks later, charges against him were dropped.

Attorneys Lonny Ben Ogus and Joe Cavanaugh also want to know what happened to the family’s 1983 Mercedes. It was impounded that November day and, Palacios said, his wife and daughter were even threatened with arrest as they tried to stop police from taking it, as they were left stranded that morning.

The city wants more than $4,700 in towing and storage fees if he wants the car back.

Nice. Go get ’em, Palacios. Police involved in situations like this must be held accountable; Heathen is official in favor of imposing personal liability for this degree of Kafkaesque misconduct.

In the wait-you’ve-got-to-be-kidding division, we note that today marks only thirty years since the last execution by guillotine in France. Yep, that’s right: most of you reading now were alive the last time that thing got used.

Bizarre.

The DoJ has come out against Network Neutrality. This is not good.

One county in California has abolished the doctrine allowing corporations to be treated as people.

Via Wired’s Thread Level blog, we find this: FBI Spy Docs Show G-Men Don’t Understand Security. And they’re right. Click through.

Instead of personal userids, the FBI relies on log sheets. This may provide sufficient accountability if everyone follows the rules. It provides no protection against rule-breakers. It is worth noting that Robert Hanssen obtained much of the information he sold to the Soviets by exploiting weak permission mechanisms in the FBI’s Automated Case System.

Via MeFi, we find news of clowns disrupting a KKK march, and that makes us really, really happy.

Via Slashdot:

The FBI is investigating fifteen store robberies in eleven states, committed via phone and internet. The perpetrators hack the store’s security system so they can observe their victims. They then make customers take their clothes off and get the store to wire money.

Via JWZ we discover that someone in a position of authority, finally, has been found guilty of something in the wake of the Abu Grahib abuse scandal.

Lt. Col. Steven Jordan was acquitted on three counts:

cruelty and maltreatment for subjecting detainees to forced nudity and intimidation by dogs; dereliction of a duty to properly train and supervise soldiers in humane interrogation rules; and failing to obey a lawful general order by ordering dogs used for interrogations without higher approval.

So what was he guilty of?

The jury found him guilty of one: disobeying a general’s order not to talk to others about the investigation into the abuse.

Sweet God in Heaven, WHAT THE HELL?

College football is upon us, and the Alabama opener isn’t televised except on pay-per-view.

Quick, somebody talk us into, or out of, paying $109 for ESPN’s GamePlan package on DTV.

Two folks who spread flower on a parking lot to provide guidance to a running group are facing felony charges because some chicken little yelled “bioterror!”

Sheesh.

The new Bionic Woman starts next month. Our fervent hope is that they resist the temptation to introduce Sasquatch, though we’d welcome sly cameos by Lee Majors or Lindsay Wagner a la Richard Hatch’s amusing turns on the new BSG.

(Fixed link)

Alberto Gonzales has finally resigned. Bush will speak on the issue later this morning.

They’re bringing back American Gladiators.

Bruce Schneier notes an article on perhaps the one book to speak truth to power about our preoccupation with terrorism:

John Mueller suspects he might have become cable news programs’ go-to foil on terrorism. The author of Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them (Free Press, 2006) thinks America has overreacted. The greatly exaggerated threat of terrorism, he says, has cost the country far more than terrorist attacks ever did.

[…]

Mueller’s book is filled with statistics meant to put terrorism in context. For example, international terrorism annually causes the same number of deaths as drowning in bathtubs or bee stings. It would take a repeat of Sept. 11 every month of the year to make flying as dangerous as driving. Over a lifetime, the chance of being killed by a terrorist is about the same as being struck by a meteor. Mueller’s conclusions: An American’s risk of dying at the hands of a terrorist is microscopic. The likelihood of another Sept. 11-style attack is nearly nil because it would lack the element of surprise. America can easily absorb the damage from most conceivable attacks. And the suggestion that al Qaeda poses an existential threat to the United States is ridiculous. Mueller’s statistics and conclusions are jarring only because they so starkly contradict the widely disseminated and broadly accepted image of terrorism as an urgent and all-encompassing threat.

Bruce links to the whole article; click through to read it all.

Google has decided that they’d rather not have all those videos people bought from them, so they’re taking them back. Sure, they’re going to credit the customers, but the end point is this: the consumers bought something, and now Google doesn’t want to have sold it, so — thanks to the magic of DRM — they’re able to call a mulligan and undo all those transactions.

First, it’s surprising that it’s Google doing this (their motto is said to be “Don’t be evil”). Second, this is pretty much all you need to know about DRM. If vendors have the ability to revoke your purchase later, they will. It’s DRM that allows that. Don’t patronize companies that foist DRM on their products; you’ll never really own anything that way.

The prosecutors in the “we don’t care if you have a prescription for those” Mark O’Hara case have announced the won’t drop the charges, this despite having their case called “ridiculous” by the appeals court.

As noted before, they’ve already bankrupted the guy. They somehow managed to get information about his prescription suppressed in the first trial; there’s no doubt they’ll try some similarly unethical angle this time around. Perhaps in response we’ll see real sanctions from the judge, or at least the Florida Bar.

Johnson and Johnson is suing the Red Cross because the charity — which is, by the way, older than J&J — is using its eponymous symbol on products it sells to the public (the proceeds help fund the Red Cross’ mission).

Can you say “douchebags,” boys and girls?

Video games you control with your urine stream

Passenger ‘hid monkey under hat’, which we found at Majikthise.

A man has been questioned by police at LaGuardia airport in New York after smuggling a monkey onto a flight from Florida by hiding it under his hat.

Passengers spotted the animal when it climbed out and perched on the man’s ponytail, Spirit Airlines spokeswoman Alison Russell told reporters.

Here’s the best part:

When passengers noticed the fist-sized primate on the flight, they asked the man “if he knew he had a monkey on him”, Ms Russell said.

MUST. HAVE. MONKEYHAT.

The DC Court of Appeals decided yesterday that there is no fundamental right to lifesaving drugs. Radley Balko has more, but the gist is this:

the bureaucrats at the FDA can now deny terminally sick people the medication that could save their lives. And not even because it isn’t safe, but because it hasn’t been proven effective, at least according to standards set by the FDA.

Right. Bureaucrats are in control, firmly. What’s worse, they cited a medical marijuana case (Raich, which held that the feds can deny pot to sick people who need it, regardless of benefit) in the decision, which makes this case another casualty, at least in part, of our bogus drug war.

Scientists develop 12-headed jellyfish.

D00D, we’re not sure 1-headed jellyfish are a good idea. WTF?

Even at the rarefied level of the FBI, wherein we supposedly place the cream of the law enforcement crop, we’ve got pretty serious problems:

Last week, a federal judge excoriated the FBI for not only hiding exculpatory evidence that would have exonerated four innocent men who served more than thirty years in prison, but for rewarding those who did the hiding and covering up with bonuses and promotions. For this crime against American citizens, American taxpayers will now shell out more than $100 million. Thus far, none of the government agents actually responsible for this crime have been held accountable. Only rewarded.

The Agitator has more on the legislative fallout of this case; apparently, we need a law to force the Feds to disclose exculpatory evidence, as well as evidence that their confidential drug informants may have committed violent felonies, including murder. In their view, we guess, keeping a drug case alive is more important than keeping the wrong people out of prison, and that’s just sick. Balko continues:

This would be a morally dubious policy even if were were talking about matters of, say, national security. But we aren’t. We’re talking about the FBI concealing evidence of murder and other violent crimes, and of knowingly allowing innocent people to go to prison in order to not disrupt drug investigations. In other words, all of this is necessary, the FBI is saying, to keep people from getting high. And when confronted by the United States Congress, the FBI can’t even say outright that this is categorically a bad idea, nor can it promise that it will institute a policy preventing these things from happening in the future.

Their hard-hitting reporting on such topics as “Could Multiple Stab Wounds Harm Monkeys?” is simply unmatched by the mainstream media.

This is fucking sick. Evidence is mounting, years later, that makes the DoD’s stonewalling regarding Tillman’s death make a bit more sense. First he was killed in battle. Then he was killed in a tragic misunderstanding, a so-called friendly fire incident. These things happen in wartime, of course.

But it’s looking a lot more like that’s not true, either. He may well have been murdered by American troops, potentially for his antiwar views.

Lovely.

For some reason, some bureaucrats think they know more about pain management than doctors.

This is a story about a Florida man imprisoned for two years because he possessed pain medication for which he had a prescription. Fortunately, he’s been released:

Tampa’s Mark O’Hara was released from prison this week. He was serving a 25-year sentence for possession of 58 Vicodin tablets. Prosecutors acknowledge he wasn’t selling the drug. They acknowledge that he had a prescription for it. At his trial, two doctors testified they’d been treating O’Hara since the early 1990s for pain related to gout and an automobile accident.

But prosecutors inexplicably brought drug trafficking charges anyway, because as the article explains, “Under the law, simply possessing the quantity of pills he had constitutes trafficking.”

This is simply stunning. The man was sentenced to 25 years for possessing 58 pills for which he had a legal prescription.

Fortunately, the appeals court called the trial “absurd” and tossed the verdict. Now we’ll see what recourse this man has; from the St Pete times:

He sold two condos, his car and his bread business to pay for the appeal. But the state took the proceeds, according to family friend Eric Mastro, to pay toward the $500,000 fine that came with his conviction.

So, the state ruined him on a bullshit charge AND took 2 years of his life because they think his doctor gave him too many Vicodin. Nice. What goatfuckers.

Because, presumably, the original equipment had long since collapsed into a dried, blackened husk, form which neither blood nor emotion could escape.

Time May Not Exist.

It now appears that Pat Tillman’s death may have been murder; it’s now also come to light that Army attorneys sent gloating emails on their success at thwarting the criminal inquiry.

Apparently, the chemical content of the modern diet has made humans unfit for human consumption. Just so you know.

The Weekly World News has shut down. More here. See also the Wikipedia article.

From MeFi, find this charming bit of news:

Detective Brian Lewis returns to his desk after lunch, scanning e-mails he missed.

One catches his eye: It says a suspected member of a methamphetamine ring bought a box of Sudafed at

Minutes later, Lewis is in his truck, circling the parking lot, searching for the woman.

Frankly, as one MeFi poster put it, we consider the lack of Sudafed worse than the presence of meth. There will always be drugs. Period. Back before Dennis Miller became a douchebag neocon, he noted well that if all drugs vanished tomorrow, people would spin in circles in their front yard trying to see God. There’s a drug problem IN PRISONS, for the love of Mike (hi, Mike), so what makes anyone with half a brain think that annoying millions of allergy sufferers is going to have any meaningful impact on the ability of the motivated to create meth? Even the clerks know it’s bullshit: we’ve had them suggest that Mrs Heathen buy one of our boxes when we’ve been over the daily limit.

Now, in addition to the bullshit at the pharmacy, we find that cops — and cops NEVER misuse their power — are apparently able to track individual purchases, literally inspecting our sundries before we’ve even left the fucking parking lot. That’s unacceptable.

At least we know who the bad guys are:

CVS, the nation’s largest pharmacy chain, is participating in the voluntary Kentucky program and plans to install MethCheck in most of its 6,200 stores across the country by the fall.

We plan to do as much shopping as possible in venues that do not “voluntarily” comply with state efforts to track the legal purchases of private citizens. You should, too.

From Rob: British Blamed for Basra Badgers:

British forces have denied rumours that they released a plague of ferocious badgers into the Iraqi city of Basra.

Word spread among the populace that UK troops had introduced strange man-eating, bear-like beasts into the area to sow panic.

[…]

UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer said: “We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.

Tom Tomorrow points out an interesting new coinage: Googlestupid. It’s defined as the unfortunate tendency of someone to make pronouncements that are trivial to investigate with the Internet, and getting them wrong. This week’s best example is yet another bit of idiocy from the Times’ David Brooks, who is called out this week for a column complaining about two female pop singers (Pink and Avril) promulgating ideas in their lyrics hostile to marriage before 30 (this, in Brooks’ world, is apparently bad). The Googlestupidity is, of course, found in the fact that Pink, 28, and Avril, 22, are married.

Anyway, this particular example of Brooks being a lazy fuck brought another article to light, this one a fairly brutal deconstruction of Brooks’ famed post-2000-election Atlantic piece “One Nation, Slightly Divided,” which we read at the time and thought little of. The author, Sasha Issenberg, has no trouble documenting that Brooks basically fabricated nearly every supposed “division” between Red and Blue America, and did so in a way that was trivially easy uncover with the most cursory of fact-checking.

Brooks’ article hinges on the comparison of two counties near DC: Montgomery County, MD, where he lived, and Franklin County, PA, which was his stand-in for Red America. We’ve been to Franklin County; it’s decidedly rural, but not at all as far from suburban DC as Brooks would like us to believe.

For example, Brooks begins (as quoted in Issenberg’s piece):

“I went to Franklin County because I wanted to get a sense of how deep the divide really is,” Brooks wrote of his leisurely northward drive to see the other America across “the Meatloaf Line; from here on there will be a lot fewer sun-dried-tomato concoctions on restaurant menus and a lot more meatloaf platters.” Franklin County was a place where “no blue New York Times delivery bags dot driveways on Sunday mornings … [where] people don’t complain that Woody Allen isn’t as funny as he used to be, because they never thought he was funny,” he wrote. “In Red America churches are everywhere. In Blue America Thai restaurants are everywhere. In Red America they have QVC, the Pro Bowlers Tour, and hunting. In Blue America we have NPR, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and socially conscious investing.”

Funny, right? Also, sadly for Brooks, bullshit. Issenberg notes that one of Goodwin’s strongest markets is deeply rural McAllen, TX, and that QVC does profoundly well in urban, wealthy areas. But Brooks was too busy to check on things like “facts.” Issenberg, though, wasn’t, and took a trip to Franklin County to check things out for himself.

Issenberg discovered many things we find not at all surprising. For example, Franklin County boats both a fine Thai grocery and gourmet coffee company (we’ve been there as well). Notwithstanding Brooks’ assertion about Red American and Woody Allen, it turned out he couldn’t rent Annie Hall at the Chambersburg Blockbuster, but only because someone had beaten him to it. Even more absurdly, Brooks had claimed he was unable to spend more than $20 on dinner anywhere in Franklin County, and further called out their Red Lobster by name as one location where he tried. Issenberg found, as any normal human knows, that Red Lobster’s menu includes plenty of options to get a single dinner tab over that mark, including a surf-and-turf for $28.75. We’ve spent many evenings eating in that area, and can tell you from personal experience that keeping a dinner tab below $20 would be the real trick — i.e., just like anywhere else in the country.

The inescapable conclusion is that Brooks basically just makes shit up; Issenberg’s money quote:

As I made my journey, it became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home.

This comes as no surprise to anyone who’s read him or his babble for the last several years, of course. Brooks, of course, didn’t see it this way, and clearly tried to intimidate Issenberg:

I called Brooks to see if I was misreading his work. I told him about my trip to Franklin County, and the ease with which I was able to spend $20 on a meal. He laughed. “I didn’t see it when I was there, but it’s true, you can get a nice meal at the Mercersburg Inn,” he said. I said it was just as easy at Red Lobster. “That was partially to make a point that if Red Lobster is your upper end … ” he replied, his voice trailing away. “That was partially tongue-in-cheek, but I did have several mini-dinners there, and I never topped $20.”

I went through some of the other instances where he made declarations that appeared insupportable. He accused me of being “too pedantic,” of “taking all of this too literally,” of “taking a joke and distorting it.” “That’s totally unethical,” he said.

“Unethical,” Mr. Brooks, is making up facts. Brooks turns out to be employing a novel “rings true” standard, which we’re sure would be at home in any Yellow Peril article from 1885 or Jim Crow editorial from 1955, but falls a bit short of modern journalistic standards, even for editorial writers. Brooks isn’t the only one doing this, but its our dollars that keep him employed and read at his rarefied level. It’s certainly not news that people like to read what the recognize, and accept and reward “analysis” that confirms prejudices, but we’d hope that the gatekeepers in the “old media” would at least make some cursory efforts toward quality control. We know the hope is vain, but we keep it anyway.

Check it out!