Murdoch’s succeeded in buying Dow Jones.

Bush has commuted Libby’s sentence, thereby sparing him prison. Details sketchy; it’s a breaking story.

Asshole.

Update: the responses are coming in, this, quoted by Sullivan, from Obama:

This decision to commute the sentence of a man who compromised our national security cements the legacy of an Administration characterized by a politics of cynicism and division, one that has consistently placed itself and its ideology above the law. This is exactly the kind of politics we must change so we can begin restoring the American people’s faith in a government that puts the country’s progress ahead of the bitter partisanship of recent years.

Word. But one-time Bushite Sullivan continues:

A great move by Obama. This has to be hung around every Republican’s neck. They are now the party of corruption, irresponsibility in national security, and perjury. The Republican party impeached the last president for perjury over sexual harassment. But they commute the sentence of a man who perjured himself in part because he leaked a national security secret. That tells you everything. They care more about their privileged friends than the rule of law. We now know that for sure.

As if there were ever any doubt.

Via JWZ, we find the story of Lonesome George, the last surviving member of a species of Galapagos tortoise.

The “eww” part? Apparently, it’s someone’s job to give the turtle a hand job.

This is just absurd. In short, the mayor has proposed a city ordinance that requires anyone shooting video on public property have a permit and a million dollar insurance policy. As the linked BoingBoing post points out, this sort of law is designed for selective enforcement. While they’ll certainly ignore tourists shooting the skyline, we expect the law will get trotted out tout de suite as soon as some citizen journalist manages to get video of cops beating unarmed protesters (again).

New Yorkers need to step up and quash this bullshit with a quickness. The rights of citizens to shoot video in public, and of public employees, should be absolute. They work for US.

Apparently, there used to be giant, 5-foot penguins in Peru.

That Italy is seeking extradition of 22 American CIA operatives involved in the “extraordinary rendition” program is old news. Now Germany is joining the club, as they’re miffed our government snatched an innocent German citizen. We expect both the Italian and German requests to be denied by the Bush administration, further straining our relationships with our European allies, and further damaging our credibility.

Thanks, George!

In St. Louis, as it happens, it’s the citizens. The ACLU is handing out video cameras so that citizens can record the activities of police.

Members of the ruling party in Japan are insisting that the Rape of Nanking did not happen.

However, they HAVE managed to protect us from butterknife-weilding grannies, so there’s that.

Weasels.

The antarctic leopard seal can be downright scary. Apparently, they’re very nearly the apex predator down there, what with the wholesale lack of polar bears. Above them, it’s only orcas.

(Via MeFi.)

Surprise, surprise, surprise. A Minnesota cop decided, on his own, that a 140-pound musician wasn’t allowed to ride his bicycle on a public street, and decided to taser him to prove his point. Heathen hope very much that said musician has the attention of several very good, very bloodthirsty personal injury lawyers at this point, because shit like this is just that: shit.

(Via BoingBoing.)

Their parliament is insisting Britain withdraw Salman Rushdie’s knighthood:

The award of a knighthood to the author Salman Rushdie justifies suicide attacks, a Pakistani government minister said today.

“This is an occasion for the 1.5 billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision,” Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, religious affairs minister, told the Pakistani parliament in Islamabad. “The west is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the ‘sir’ title.”

Turns out if you give people too much power, they tend to abuse it! The Feds may have broken the law hundreds if not thousands of times in their eavesdropping program. Great.

His Portrait of a Modern Terrorist as an Idiot is mandatory reading.

The recently publicized terrorist plot to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport, like so many of the terrorist plots over the past few years, is a study in alarmism and incompetence: on the part of the terrorists, our government and the press.

Terrorism is a real threat, and one that needs to be addressed by appropriate means. But allowing ourselves to be terrorized by wannabe terrorists and unrealistic plots — and worse, allowing our essential freedoms to be lost by using them as an excuse — is wrong.

The alleged plan, to blow up JFK’s fuel tanks and a small segment of the 40-mile petroleum pipeline that supplies the airport, was ridiculous. The fuel tanks are thick-walled, making them hard to damage. The airport tanks are separated from the pipelines by cutoff valves, so even if a fire broke out at the tanks, it would not back up into the pipelines. And the pipeline couldn’t blow up in any case, since there’s no oxygen to aid combustion. Not that the terrorists ever got to the stage — or demonstrated that they could get there — where they actually obtained explosives. Or even a current map of the airport’s infrastructure.

But read what Russell Defreitas, the lead terrorist, had to say: “Anytime you hit Kennedy, it is the most hurtful thing to the United States. To hit John F. Kennedy, wow…. They love JFK — he’s like the man. If you hit that, the whole country will be in mourning. It’s like you can kill the man twice.”

If these are the terrorists we’re fighting, we’ve got a pretty incompetent enemy.

You couldn’t tell that from the press reports, though. “The devastation that would be caused had this plot succeeded is just unthinkable,” U.S. Attorney Roslynn R. Mauskopf said at a news conference, calling it “one of the most chilling plots imaginable.” Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) added, “It had the potential to be another 9/11.”

[…]

This isn’t the first time a bunch of incompetent terrorists with an infeasible plot have been painted by the media as poised to do all sorts of damage to America. In May we learned about a six-man plan to stage an attack on Fort Dix by getting in disguised as pizza deliverymen and shooting as many soldiers and Humvees as they could, then retreating without losses to fight again another day. Their plan, such as it was, went awry when they took a videotape of themselves at weapons practice to a store for duplication and transfer to DVD. The store clerk contacted the police, who in turn contacted the FBI. (Thank you to the video store clerk for not overreacting, and to the FBI agent for infiltrating the group.)

The “Miami 7,” caught last year for plotting — among other things — to blow up the Sears Tower, were another incompetent group: no weapons, no bombs, no expertise, no money and no operational skill. And don’t forget Iyman Faris, the Ohio trucker who was convicted in 2003 for the laughable plot to take out the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch. At least he eventually decided that the plan was unlikely to succeed.

I don’t think these nut jobs, with their movie-plot threats, even deserve the moniker “terrorist.” But in this country, while you have to be competent to pull off a terrorist attack, you don’t have to be competent to cause terror. All you need to do is start plotting an attack and — regardless of whether or not you have a viable plan, weapons or even the faintest clue — the media will aid you in terrorizing the entire population.

[…]

So these people should be locked up … assuming they are actually guilty, that is. Despite the initial press frenzies, the actual details of the cases frequently turn out to be far less damning. Too often it’s unclear whether the defendants are actually guilty, or if the police created a crime where none existed before.

The JFK Airport plotters seem to have been egged on by an informant, a twice-convicted drug dealer. An FBI informant almost certainly pushed the Fort Dix plotters to do things they wouldn’t have ordinarily done. The Miami gang’s Sears Tower plot was suggested by an FBI undercover agent who infiltrated the group. And in 2003, it took an elaborate sting operation involving three countries to arrest an arms dealer for selling a surface-to-air missile to an ostensible Muslim extremist. Entrapment is a very real possibility in all of these cases.

The rest of them stink of exaggeration. Jose Padilla was not actually prepared to detonate a dirty bomb in the United States, despite histrionic administration claims to the contrary. Now that the trial is proceeding, the best the government can charge him with is conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim, and it seems unlikely that the charges will stick. An alleged ringleader of the U.K. liquid bombers, Rashid Rauf, had charges of terrorism dropped for lack of evidence (of the 25 arrested, only 16 were charged). And now it seems like the JFK mastermind was more talk than action, too.

Remember the “Lackawanna Six,” those terrorists from upstate New York who pleaded guilty in 2003 to “providing support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization”? They entered their plea because they were threatened with being removed from the legal system altogether. We have no idea if they were actually guilty, or of what.

[…]

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have all the facts in any of these cases. None of us do. So let’s have some healthy skepticism. Skepticism when we read about these terrorist masterminds who were poised to kill thousands of people and do incalculable damage. Skepticism when we’re told that their arrest proves that we need to give away our own freedoms and liberties. And skepticism that those arrested are even guilty in the first place.

There is a real threat of terrorism. And while I’m all in favor of the terrorists’ continuing incompetence, I know that some will prove more capable. We need real security that doesn’t require us to guess the tactic or the target: intelligence and investigation — the very things that caught all these terrorist wannabes — and emergency response. But the “war on terror” rhetoric is more politics than rationality. We shouldn’t let the politics of fear make us less safe.

WORD. Seriously.

How much longer are we going to put up with shit like this?

“I demanded to speak to a TSA [Transportation Security Administration] supervisor who asked me if the water in the sippy cup was ‘nursery water or other bottled water.’ I explained that the sippy cup water was filtered tap water. The sippy cup was seized as my son was pointing and crying for his cup. I asked if I could drink the water to get the cup back, and was advised that I would have to leave security and come back through with an empty cup in order to retain the cup. As I was escorted out of security by TSA and a police officer, I unscrewed the cup to drink the water, which accidentally spilled because I was so upset with the situation.

“At this point, I was detained against my will by the police officer and threatened to be arrested for endangering other passengers with the spilled 3 to 4 ounces of water. I was ordered to clean the water, so I got on my hands and knees while my son sat in his stroller with no shoes on since they were also screened and I had no time to put them back on his feet.

“I was ordered to apologize for the spilled water, and again threatened arrest. I was threatened several times with arrest while detained, and while three other police officers were called to the scene of the mother with the 19 month old. A total of four police officers and three TSA officers reported to the scene where I was being held against my will. I was also told that I should not disrespect the officer and could be arrested for this too. I apologized to the officer and she continued to detain me despite me telling her that I would miss my flight. The officer advised me that I should have thought about this before I ‘intentionally spilled the water!'”

Goatfuckers.

Via MSNBC, but widely linked:

BOSTON — A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago.

Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3-1/2 inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale’s age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old.

From CNN:

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) — Screaming and crying, Paris Hilton was escorted out of a courtroom and back to jail Friday after a judge ruled that she must serve out her entire 45-day sentence behind bars rather than in her Hollywood Hills home.

A Chinese newspaper clerk is in trouble for allowing a reference to the Tiananmen massacre in a classified ad. It wasn’t deliberate; as it happens, the clerk had never heard of the massacre, as state censorship of any reference to the event is profound and total, so the clerk had no idea what was special about “mothers of June 4.”

(Via Mike, who found it here.)

Robot lawnmower kills Danish man.

Sometimes, a lede doesn’t really capture the story, or the truth of the matter, but when the lede is “The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease,” you pretty much know what you’re getting, right?

The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.

The Agriculture Department tests fewer than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. A beef producer in the western state of Kansas, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wants to test all of its cows.

Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone should test its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive tests on their larger herds as well.

The Agriculture Department regulates the test and argued that widespread testing could lead to a false positive that would harm the meat industry.

There is, of course, more.

Russia tests new ICBM system. Oh, good.

Apparently, some sharks need not fuck in order to reproduce.

Female sharks can fertilize their own eggs and give birth without sperm from males, according to a new study of the asexual reproduction of a hammerhead in a U.S. zoo.

Prof. Felton deconstructs their school ratings, which are just about as boneheaded as anything we’ve heard today:

Newsweek has once again issued its list of America’s Best High Schools. They’re using the same goofy formula as before: the number of students from a school who show up for AP or IB exams, divided by the number who graduate. Just showing up for an exam raises your school’s rating; graduating lowers your school’s rating.

Seriously. Read that bold part again. (Emphasis added.)

As before, my hypothetical Monkey High is still the best high school in the universe. Monkey High has a strict admissions policy, allowing only monkeys to enroll. The monkeys are required to attend AP and IB exams; but they learn nothing and thus fail to graduate. Monkey High has an infinite rating on Newsweek’s scale.

What’s worse, they actually EXCLUDE some obviously very good schools because their students score too highly on the SAT:

Also as before, Newsweek excludes selective schools whose students have high SAT scores. Several such schools appear on a special list, with the mind-bending caption “Newsweek excluded these high performers from the list of America’s Best High Schools because so many of their students score well above the average on the SAT and ACT.” Some of these schools were relegated to the same list last year — and still, they’re not even trying to lower their SAT scores!

As we all know, the ID requirement for flight these days is about airline revenue, not security. The airlines had a problem with people selling tickets they couldn’t use, so they wanted to tie tickets to individuals. Putting names on the tickets didn’t work, since any male could fly on one of our tickets, and any female on Mrs Heathen’s. However, after 9/11 they managed to get the Feds to require ID, and the problem was solved.

Sort of. As it turns out — and this should surprise precisely nobody — the new ID requirement is yet another example of the naked emperor. A CBS affiliate in Kansas City set out to see how rigid it is, and were able to get past security with a totally fabricated ID made on a home computer. Nice.

Now, seeing as how this ID thing has nada to do with safety — remember, the 9/11 guys had valid ID — we think it’s pretty funny they’re doing basically nothing to enforce the edict, but if they’re so ineffectual on this, what else are they dropping the ball on?

Oh, wait. We know that answer, too.

We said, and many agreed, that we were amazed that Gonzales actually made us miss Ashcroft, but we had no idea how true this was. Check this out:

On the night of March 10, 2004, as Attorney General John D. Ashcroft lay ill in an intensive-care unit, his deputy, James B. Comey, received an urgent call.

White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and President Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., were on their way to the hospital to persuade Ashcroft to reauthorize Bush’s domestic surveillance program, which the Justice Department had just determined was illegal.

In vivid testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Comey said he alerted FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and raced, sirens blaring, to join Ashcroft in his hospital room, arriving minutes before Gonzales and Card. Ashcroft, summoning the strength to lift his head and speak, refused to sign the papers they had brought.

Yeah, that’s right; Ashcroft wouldn’t sign off on the illegal wiretapping that his successor embraced so fully. As Wired puts it: “You know a government surveillance program is getting a tad iffy when John Ashcroft balks at giving it his John Hancock, even just for a while.”

Jerry Falwell is dead. We’re sure it’s awful for his family and loved ones and all, but here at Heathen Central we found the Rev. to be a strikingly divisive character who spent his career misrepresenting Christianity as some sort of faith-based cudgel. America and the world are better off without that brand of pseudo-piety. Do not forget that it was Falwell who said this, in the days after 9/11:

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’

More: BoingBoing has a link to a list of some of his other odious quotes, including:

• “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals”
• “It appears that America’s anti-Biblical feminist movement is at last dying, thank God, and is possibly being replaced by a Christ-centered men’s movement which may become the foundation for a desperately needed national spiritual awakening.”
• “Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions”

Banksy, the British artist-prankster. Click through.

Armless Driver Escapes Police:

Michael Francis Wiley of Port Richey, Florida has no arms, only one leg, and is one of the “most accomplished traffic violators” in Pasco County, according to news reports. Yesterday, police chased Wiley, 40, in a “suspcious vehicle” but he managed to outrun them. Wiley steers with his shoulder stumps. A few years ago, he attempted to elude police in a green Corvette speeding along at 120 mph. He has such a terrible record that driving at all is a felony crime.

Part of Wiley’s resume also includes spousal battery and assaulting a state trooper. Without using arms, which he does not have.

They’re now pushing hard for laws that will restrict the sale of used CDs, which strongly suggests they’d like very much to dismantle the whole “doctrine of first sale” thing entirely. From Ars:

New “pawn shop” laws are springing up across the United States that will make selling your used CDs at the local record shop something akin to getting arrested. No, you won’t spend any time in jail, but you’ll certainly feel like a criminal once the local record shop makes copies of all of your identifying information and even collects your fingerprints. Such is the state of affairs in Florida, which now has the dubious distinction of being so anal about the sale of used music CDs that record shops there are starting to get out of the business of dealing with used content because they don’t want to pay a $10,000 bond for the “right” to treat their customers like criminals.

The legislation is supposed to stop the sale of counterfeit and/or stolen music CDs, despite the fact that there has been no proof that this is a particularly pressing problem for record shops in general. Yet John Mitchell, outside counsel for the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, told Billboard that this is part of “some sort of a new trend among states to support second-hand-goods legislation.” And he expects it to grow.

In Florida, Utah, and soon in Rhode Island and Wisconsin, selling your used CDs to the local record joint will be more scrutinized than then getting a driver’s license in those states. For retailers in Florida, for instance, there’s a “waiting period” statue that prohibits them from selling used CDs that they’ve acquired until 30 days have passed. Furthermore, the Florida law disallows stores from providing anything but store credit for used CDs. It looks like college students will need to stick to blood plasma donations for beer money.

Apparently, sometimes spiders eat chickens. Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew. EW.

They’re insisting they plan to go after everyone who published or disclosed or disseminated the key we saw all over the net last week. Yeah, good luck with that.

MS is trying to buy Yahoo for $50B.

At Verizon, you now have to pay a fee for not paying a fee.

John Hodgeman explains the World Bank on TDS.

Here is a very funny strip from a guy who got fired recently.

Bush’s Justice Department is trying to make Gitmo even more illegal:

Last week, the Justice Department quietly filed a motion with the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that would cap the number of visits by civilian defense lawyers to their clients at Guantanamo at three. Ever. Attorney-client mail would no longer be private. These requests are grounded in the brazen claim that civilian attorneys foment unrest at the prison. Perhaps if the detainees were to be completely isolated and ignored, they would realize how happy they are.

WTF? How can we be letting this happen? Via Slate. It gets worse:

And the real problem at Gitmo, adds Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at NYU law school, is that even after you funnel all 60 or so prisoners who are still awaiting their not-yet-begun “trials” through to their quite inevitable findings of guilt, you still have at least 160 more “who will most likely never be charged, never be tried, and may nonetheless never be sent home.” These are the folks whom, no matter how thin the evidence and how cooked the proceedings, the government still can’t make a case against, yet doesn’t want to release. The Bush administration has absolutely no clue what to do with these people, and they aren’t going to figure it out. So, the new legal strategy seems to be: Stop them from embarrassing us. That means no contact with attorneys who might tell your stories of torture and abuse to the outside world. It means no awkward hunger strikes that might garner world sympathy. It means doing everything you can to make even the “black hole” there disappear. What the government really needs is for the folks down at Guantanamo to stop complaining, stop talking, and stop trying to kill themselves.

That creepy “cameras with speakers so Big Brother can yell at you” thing they’ve got going on in parts of the U.K.? Yeah, now they’re doing it in DC.

On Sunday, Colorado Rockies shortstop Troy Tulowitzki — a rookie! — did something that has only happened 12 other times in the history of major league baseball: he managed an unassisted triple play.

There’s video at the link, but a reply (included) is really required. It goes like this:

1. 3-2 pitch, and the batter hits a line drive. Tulowitzki catches it for out #1 within a stride or two of 2nd base.
2. The runners had already started, but because the ball had been caught, they’d need to tag up their original bases. Tulowitzki makes the obvious play and steps on the 2nd base bag to doom the runner who started for 3rd a bit early, thereby notching out #2.
3. The first base runner, unaware of the growing drama, it still en route to 2nd. Still on the bag, Tulowitzki reaches out from 2nd and tags him for out #3.
4. For reasons known but to God, Tulowitzki then threw the ball to first. Even if the first catch hadn’t scratched the batter, a 4th out is not typically required.

The whole thing took not much more than a second.

Such plays are, as we noted, rare: this is the first since 2003. Prior to that, they happened in 2000, 1994, 1992, 1968, two in 1927, 1925, two in 1923, 1920, and 1909.

You probably shouldn’t.

We’re sure that most police officers are intelligent and principled individuals, but the fact remains that when a small group is given extraordinary powers in society, “trust” is not really something that should be operative. Blind trust in authority is madness; the only way to survive is to create a rigorous oversight structure that makes it all but impossible for the empowered to engage in the kind of criminal behavior that is unfortunately so common in law enforcement the world over, and that we see exemplified in Atlanta in the story linked above.

They think it’s bullshit, too, though it’s a little surprising they buy into Audiable Magic’s claims so completely. In any case, it’s clear to anyone who’s paying attention that DRM is doomed — on CDs, DVDs, or whatever. It can’t work, and, as the Economist puts it, “there are better ways of doing this than treating customers as if they were criminals.”

True. (Widely linked.)

22nd. As expected, L.S.U.’s giant QB JaMarcus Russell went first, to Oakland. Notre Dame’s pretty-boy, can’t-win-the-big-game Brady Quinn had to wait a while.

And with that, College Football 2006 is now over. See you in August. ;)

As it turns out, that letter to the editor in Arkansas was a joke.

Over at BB, we find the story of a Canadian prof denied entry to the US recently because he once admitted to taking LSD.

In 1967.

Congress is screwing us on this issue, but fortunately slackjawed yokels in Arkansas are paying attention. Whew.

(MeFi.)

Yale bans stage weapons in wake of VaTech shootings

Boris Yeltsin, the first popularly elected Russian leader, is dead. He was 76.

Scientists have found some chimpanzees who are living in caves and using spears.

The article makes no mention of any enormous black monoliths.

The Pew Charitable Trust did a survey of political and current-event awareness, and found that the best informed group regularly watched “The Daiily Show” and “The Colbert Report” — and that Fox viewers were, on the whole, the least well-informed:

Other details are equally eye-opening. Pew judged the levels of knowledgeability (correct answers) among those surveyed and found that those who scored the highest were regular watchers of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and Colbert Report. They tied with regular readers of major newspapers in the top spot — with 54% of them getting 2 out of 3 questions correct. Watchers of the Lehrer News Hour on PBS followed just behind.

Virtually bringing up the rear were regular watchers of Fox News. Only 1 in 3 could answer 2 out of 3 questions correctly.

This, of course, surprises no one. We’re sure the Right Wing Noise Machine will be along directly to tell us how biased it is to ask people who the Speaker of the House is, the Majority Leader, the Secretary of State, who their governor is, or what type of Muslim, other than Shia, live in Iraq.

As for TDS and Stewart, we quote our longtime associate BC: “I think it’s really funny that they won a Peabody. I think it’s even funnier that they deserved to.”

Look, if you think you can’t or won’t do part of a given job because of your religion or whatever, then perhaps you should find another job. This goes for pharmacy techs uncomfortable with birth control or emergency contraception just as it goes for cabbies who won’t carry people carrying alcohol at Minnesota airports. Seriously.

We’re actually shocked that the Amish have apparently gotten some dispensation against having reflecting triangles on their buggies on the grounds of religion; sounds like bullshit to us.

5,000 rabbits block traffic in Hungary.