If you only read one bit about it, read this one.

If you read two, read this open letter to the Chancellor by an untenured faculty member with, apparently, balls of steel.

First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden were booed over the weekend when they appeared at a NASCAR function as part of a campaign for military veterans.

Really, you knuckledragging jokers? Booing people working for veterans because they’re married to Democrats? Awesome. Way to confirm all sorts of stereotypes.

… “Hey, at least we’re not Penn State.”

According to the attorney general’s office, in 2002 a graduate student assistant went to Paterno’s home the day after he saw Sandusky sexually assaulting a boy in the shower late at night at Lasch Football Building on the Penn State campus. Paterno told Curley the next day.

About 10 days after the incident, Curley and Schultz met with the graduate assistant who had witnessed the abuse. Their executive action, according to the grand jury report: They told Sandusky that he could not bring any children from his foundation into the football building any more.

No one from Penn State — not Paterno, not the human neckties, no one — ever reported the alleged incident to law enforcement, which the grand jury report says is required under Pennsylvania law

At the clearly lost and doomed Hewlett-Packard, the news today is that Shane Robison, EVP and chief strategy officer, is leaving. He will not be replaced.

Everyone ought to read this long piece from the New Yorker about post-9/11 America, and the opportunities we lost as a consequence of bad choices.

You are not Facebook’s customer. You are Facebook’s product. They tell us that now we have more control than ever about what information we put in, but I remind you all that the ONLY way to have REAL control over that data is not to give it to Facebook in the first place.

People sometimes ask why I don’t publish the whole feed of this blog there; this is one reason. This is also why virtually none of my photos are on Facebook.

Go read this account of this news story you may have seen. Basically, three brown people in a row together is enough to send folks into hysterics and result in innocent American citizens being roughed up, arrested, detained, and humiliated. To say nothing of the costs of scrambling F-16s to shadow the flight. Jesus Fuck.

The Atlantic has more.

Color us unsurprised that Irish catholics are objecting to a new law that requires they report child abuse.

A girl in England has just been given a no-shit bionic hand. Go watch the video. It’s amazing.

I don’t know who Twitter user @DannyZuker is, but he completely wins the Internet today. Pic below in case the Tweet gets vanished somehow:

Bugs should NOT be this big.

The Agitator points out these pictures. The man in those pictures playing with his family, was very nearly murdered by the state of Mississippi; his name is Cory Maye. He was finally released last week, after a decade behind bars.

Cory Maye is finally free.

A refresher, in case you’ve forgotten:

Shortly after midnight on December 26, 2001, Maye, then 21, was drifting off to sleep in his Prentiss duplex as the television blared in the background. Hours earlier, he had put his 18-month-old-daughter to sleep. He was soon awoken by the sounds of armed men attempting to break into his home. In the confusion, he fired three bullets from the handgun he kept in his nightstand.

As he’d later testify in court, Maye realized within seconds that he’d just shot a cop. A team of police officers from the area had received a tip from an informant — later revealed to be a racist drug addict — that there was a drug dealer living in the small yellow duplex on Mary Street. It now seems clear that the police were after Jamie Smith, who lived on the other side of the duplex, not Maye or his live-in girlfriend Chenteal Longino. Neither Maye nor Longino had a criminal record. Their names weren’t on the search warrants.

The FBI raided a Virginia server colocation facility this week to seize some servers belonging to some investigation target. They had a warrant for this, presumably issued by a judge.

What they did not have was permission to steal dozens of other servers in the process, but they did anyway because either (a) they’re too stupid to know the difference between “server” and “rack” or (b) they just didn’t care about the effect this would have on several innocent businesses.

Instapaper was among those hurt by the FBI’s egregiously unprofessional behavior here; he’s got much to say (read his followup, too; the servers were returned, eventually, but that doesn’t excuse their taking in the first place). The hoster, Digital One, clearly didn’t handle this well either, but they’re quoted extensively in the NYTimes coverage:

In an e-mail to one of its clients on Tuesday afternoon, DigitalOne’s chief executive, Sergej Ostroumow, said: “This problem is caused by the F.B.I., not our company. In the night F.B.I. has taken 3 enclosures with equipment plugged into them, possibly including your server — we cannot check it.”

Mr. Ostroumow said that the F.B.I. was only interested in one of the company’s clients but had taken servers used by “tens of clients.”

He wrote: “After F.B.I.’s unprofessional ‘work’ we can not restart our own servers, that’s why our Web site is offline and support doesn’t work.” The company’s staff had been working to solve the problem for the previous 15 hours, he said.

There’s more coverage at the LA Times.

Law enforcement in general is not sufficiently accountable for overreaches, so I doubt anything will actually happen to the the agent or agents who so cavalierly stole these servers. (Yes, “stole.” The warrants for adjacent boxes do not impart legal authority to remove the unnamed servers; ergo, theft.) That’s wrong: the agency and agents should be liable for criminal and civil penalties when seizures like this go so far awry. There are too many “innocent mistakes” and too little accountability. I’m not talking about innocent mistakes; I’m talking about willfully being jackasses and not caring about the repercussions.

Of course, that will never happen. And without accountability, there’s no reason for the FBI to care that their methods are outdated, that they’re harming innocent businesses and users, and that they’re showing everyone how little they understand about modern computing.

But a man can dream.

Ours is a reasonable one, but it’s not without some pretty egregious abuses and flaws. Radley Balko of The Agitator has a two part series over at HuffPo covering some common criminal justice myths; it’s worth your time.

• Part one
• Part two

“Amish Sexter Sought Buggy Sex With Girl, 12.”

I’ve written frequently here about the need for additional prosecutorial oversight, and about the distorting effects of their immunity; this case may take the cake, though I’m sure some overstepping jackass will exceed the venality of Philadelphia’s Seth Williams.

The story is this:

Philadelphia is a city with legally permitted open carry. Mark Fiorino had a bit of a run in with the Philly cops, who were completely ignorant of the law and threatened to shoot him for having a legal gun on his hip. That’s ridiculous enough.

It turns out Mr Fiorino has had run-ins with overzealous police before, though, so he recorded this run in, and said recording makes it abundantly clear what ignorant thug’s Philly had representing it as policemen that night.

All of this is bad, to be sure; as Balko points out in the first link, cops are the first to note that ignorance of laws is no excuse for breaking them — but that same ignorance appears to be permissible for the cops themselves. We’re used to this, though, sad state of affairs though it may be.

But it gets worse:

Philly DA R. Seth Williams knows Fiorino broke no laws, but has still made the decision to have him arrested, and to charge him with crimes he knows are trumped up.

So what are we to then make of Philadelphia District Attorney R. Seth Williams’ decision to arrest and charge Fiorino after Fiorino posted the recordings on the Internet?

Here’s what I make of it: It’s criminal. Fiorino embarrassed Philadelphia cops, and Williams is punishing him for it. Williams and the police spokesman are claiming Fiorino deliberately provoked the cops. No, he didn’t. He didn’t wave the gun at anyone. He didn’t invite police scrutiny. The cops confronted him upon seeing a weapon he was legally carrying in a perfectly legal manner. And they were wrong. Make no mistake. This is blatant intimidation.

But while their behavior in this story was repugnant, at least the cops had the plausible explanation of ignorance for the initial confrontation, then fear for their safety when an armed man they incorrectly thought was violating the law pushed back (though neither is an excuse, and neither should exclude them from discipline). What Williams has done since is much worse. It is premeditated. Much more than the cops, Williams should know the law. Moreover, even if he didn’t know the law at the time, he has since had plenty of time to research it. By now, Williams does know the law. (If he doesn’t, he is incompetent.) And he knows that even if Fiorino did deliberately provoke the cops to test their knowledge of Philadelphia’s gun laws, that also is not a crime.

Yet he’s charging Fiorino anyway, with “reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct”–the vague sorts of charges cops and prosecutors often fall back on when they can’t show any actual crime.

More:

Note that nothing Fiorino did was on its own illegal. Willliams is attempting a striking, blatantly dishonest bit of legal chicanery. His theory goes like this: If you undertake a series of actions that are perfectly legal and well within your rights, but that cause government agents to react in irrational ways that jeopardize public safety, you are guilty of endangering the public.

This can’t stand. It’s a blatant abuse of office. Williams is using the state’s awesome power to arrest and incarcerate to intimidate a man who exposed and embarrassed law enforcement officials who, because of their own ignorance, nearly killed him. Exposing that sort of government incompetence cannot be illegal. And it isn’t illegal.

The message Williams is sending is this: Yes, you might technically have the right to carry a gun in Philadelphia. But if you exercise that right, you should be prepared for the possibility that police officers will illegally stop you, detain you, threaten to kill you, and arrest you. And I’m not going to do a damn thing about it.

The Indiana Supremes have rules that cops can enter your house whenever they want, and that you do not have the right to prevent their unlawful entry.

I’ve thought for a while that I’d put together a longer post about the death of Bin Laden last week, but there’s not a lot I can say about it that hasn’t been said better elsewhere, except to answer questions put to me directly. I have definitely been asked where my outrage is about an extrajudicial activity like this, given my “rule of law” bent so well documented here.

On that point, I’m pretty unbothered. OBL was pretty clear in what he wanted, what he was responsible for, and what he planned to do in the future. He’s not some made-up boogeyman; plenty of sources agree on his role in the resurgence of xenophobic jihadism in the Middle East. (If you haven’t, please do go read The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright’s Pultizer-winning account of the rise of Al Qaeda.) Bin Laden was a bad guy and an enemy of peaceful people everywhere; as the President noted in his announcement, he’s killed no small number of Muslims. And, unlike the bulk of the people we housed at Gitmo these last 9+ years, we actually KNOW he was guilty.

So, Eichmann aside, I don’t have any problem at all with this move. I don’t even have a problem if the mission parameters were structured to make live capture essentially impossible despite giving lip service to the idea. I’d feel the same way about Mullah Omar, but probably not about many other folks — I mean, these guys are avowed terrorists who want to kill Americans. They don’t stop being that just because they’re not holding a gun right now. Again, unlike most of the folks we nabbed and stuck in extraconstitutional hell, there’s no doubt about the names at the top of the AQ masthead. (Indeed, my point all along was that people like Maher Arar were detained, tortured, and otherwise assaulted without any evidence of wrongdoing — and then released with no recourse.)

So what of torture and intelligence gathering? Folks are definitely making lots of noise about this, and Bush apologists are saying that waterboard-gained intel is what put us on the path to Abbottabad. Well, opinions vary, but even if we did it was still wrong. However, I’m not alone in thinking it wasn’t torture, if only because of the timeline. Evidence points to real intel, not waterboarding, as the source of this leak. Or, as the Economist pointed out, if the elimination of Osama Bin Laden was a triumph for the tactics of a TV hero, it was Lester Freamon, not Jack Bauer.

Which, finally, brings us to the most cogent and clearest analysis of all this comes from Radley Balko. In his view, dead or not, Osama won. You should read this, even if you skip most of the rest of these links. He set out to harm America, and he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Food for thought.

The makers of the Tom Tom line of GPS devices sold information about their customers’ driving habits to law enforcement, enabling the cops to then create speed traps in just the right spots.

They’ve pretty much just killed the whole idea of class action lawsuits.

Alabama’s getting hammered by a massive tornado, and that includes areas near and dear to Heathen Nation. Here’s a roundup of the links sent my way in the last hour:

A little roundup of Alabama tornado links:

• Video from, reportedly, McFarland and 15th street; apparently the mall is mostly unscathed, but pretty much everything else at that intersection is gone.
• More video from the same spot
• Live video from an apartment balcony from a college student, god love ’em.
• DCH apparently okay despite earlier reports of destruction
• More video from the local CBS station, showing the size of the storm — more than a mile, apparently.
• Another still of the tornado itself
• More (breathlessly narrated) video from a student.
• Another twitpic
• A camphone shot from the north side of the UA campus, facing south towards the stadium
• Absolutely horrifying video shot by Crimson Tide Productions; I think we can forgive the heavy background breathing given the subjejct.

Also, not to make light, but no more HotNow, Tide faithful.

Reports put the wind at 177 knots, which would put it well into F4 territory.

Finally, there’s a longrunning live feed at ABC 33/40. This storm started in eastern Mississippi, and is still causing havoc east of Birmingham.

No clear word on any campus damage, but one bystander stated that it was possible to see Coleman Coliseum from the parking lot of University Mall. If true, that’s mindblowing.

Ol’ Mohney notes that this guy’s Twitter stream has lots of updates.

Kiwi prop engineers extraordinaire have made a functioning mermaid tail for a local double-amputee.

(Via MeFi.)

The Bronx Zoo has lost track of a cobra. Don’t worry; they’re pretty sure it’s in the reptile house. Somewhere.

Fear of Japan’s nuclear crisis far exceeds actual risks. Seriously.

Nuclear energy is safe. By way of a metric, let’s try a thought experiment: How many deaths can we attribute to the mining, processing, and use of coal for energy, per megawatt-hour? Now, let’s try the same guess for nuclear power.

Here’s something else to review: Randall Munroe of XKCD fame created this comparison chart to help people understand the various dangers of varying levels of radiation exposure. Please, take a moment and review, if you’re at all freaking out about Japan.

It turns out that sperm whales may have names.

This is a video of the tsunami coming in. It’s a little long, but stay with it.

Strict building codes saved countless lives in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami.

Today’s Times includes this writeup of a little wedding in Austin:

“WE said 4:44, and we meant 4:44,” Michael Nesmith, the wedding officiant, said with mock insistence before about 125 guests on March 4 in Butler Park, which looks out at the Austin, Tex., skyline.

There was no processional. The couple about to be joined, Carolyn Wonderland, a blues singer and guitarist, and A. Whitney Brown, a writer and comedian, were already standing on their marks. There was nothing else to wait for except the string of fours that had been specified in the wedding invitation.

Yes, that Mike Nesmith, with whom I share a church, apparently.

Yes, that A. Whitney Brown.

And yes, obviously, that Carolyn Wonderland.

Oh, okay. Fine.

This has the potential to be a bit earth-shaking:

The buzz is building over a paper by Richard Hoover, an award-winning astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, concluding that filaments and other features found in the interior of three specimens of a rare class of meteorite appear to be fossils of a life form strongly resembling cyanobacteria. Chemical analysis, Hoover argues, shows no evidence that the fossils are of organisms that infiltrated the meteorites after they arrived on Earth.

It’s now legal to kidnap, torture, and hold US citizens without charge as long as you insist they’re “terrorists.”

I’m sure this will never be abused at all.

This is impossibly rich:

Earlier this week the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety issued a relatively uncontroversial report saying that urban roads are safer than rural roads in terms of traffic fatalities, since urban roads generally have slower speeds and better access to hospitals.

The Governors Highway Safety Association (last spotted blaming pedestrian fatalities on Michelle Obama), however, begs to differ:

Many traffic safety groups such as the Governors Highway Safety Association argue that such comparisons don’t accurately reflect how safe a state’s roads are. A better measure, they say, is whether states have enacted proven safety enhancements such as motorcycle helmet laws and primary seat belt laws, which allow police to stop motorists solely for being unbuckled. […]

Judith Stone, president of Washington, D.C.-based Advocates for Auto and Highway Safety, says the group does not consider fatalities when issuing its annual report card on states. “We look at laws and whether they’ve been passed,” Stone says. (Emph. added)

Advocates of stronger laws say it’s difficult to persuade a state such as New Hampshire, which has no seat belt or motorcycle helmet laws, to enact such rules when its death rate is below the U.S. average. “States like … New Hampshire could certainly save more lives by passing stronger laws,” says governors safety association spokesman Jonathan Adkins. “Legislators note these states have relatively low fatality rates and tend not to see the benefit in passing stronger laws.”

Just go read it.

Important Spider News.

The Buffalo Beast list is out. Enjoy.

NYT:

A newly disclosed document reveals that Vatican officials told the bishops of Ireland in 1997 that they had serious reservations about the bishops’ policy of mandatory reporting of priests suspected of child abuse to the police or civil authorities.

The document appears to contradict Vatican claims that church leaders in Rome never sought to control the actions of local bishops in abuse cases, and that the Roman Catholic Church did not impede criminal investigations of child abuse suspects.

Hold them accountable.

The NYT has a nice long piece on Stuxnet today. Basically, it’s pretty much clear now that the worm that did major damage to the Iranian nuke program was a joint project of the US and Israel.

This is what “cyberwar” looks like. We released a targeted computer virus that did real-world damage to an enemy’s offensive capability.

Radley Balko notes that those stupid laws that make it hard for me to buy decongestants apparently aren’t doing a damn bit of good as far as meth usage is concerned, and instead have created a lucrative black market for Sudafed while inconveniencing pharmacies and allergy sufferers for no good reason.

The CIA has a new task force to assess the impact of the cablegate leak.

The name? Wikileaks Task Force. Yes, WTF.

Nate Silver on the Julian Assange charges:

The handling of the case has been highly irregular from the start, in ways that would seem to make clear that the motivation for bringing the charges is political.

Indeed. Go read the whole thing. A bit more:

The initial warrant in the case against Mr. Assange had been issued in August. But it was revoked the next day, due to what the lead prosecutor cited as a lack of evidence. It was only last month — just as WikiLeaks was preparing to release a set of confidential diplomatic cables –that Sweden again issued a warrant to detain him.

After turning himself in to the authorities in London, Mr. Assange was initially denied bail (although he has since been awarded it) — which is particularly unusual given that Swedish authorities have still not formally charged him with a crime, but merely want to bring him in for questioning. Most unusually still, Sweden had issued an Interpol red alert for Mr. Assange’s arrest, something they have done for only one other person this year accused of a sex crime: Jan Christer Wallenkurtz, who is suspected of multiple cases of sexual assault against children.

I totally get that the FBI has the shivvers about Moolim Terra and all, but they’re starting to look silly.

First, we’ve had yet another example of the FBI trumpeting success in quashing a “terror plot” that was basically engineered by the FBI in the first place. They’ve done this more than once, and they’re basically getting passes on entrapment over and over again — but the bottom line is that none of these guys would’ve actually done anything nefarious without the the FBI’s undercover goading and undercover “weapons” or “explosives” dealers.

Now, we have this story from California. The gist is that some Muslims in an Orange County mosque became distressed by the increasingly violent rhetoric of one of their new members, so they called the Feds. And subsequently discovered that the “violent” instigator was . . . a mole for the FBI.

Nice one, guys. How ’bout you try catching some actual bad guys who, you know, do bad stuff without you setting it up for them?

Comcast has started charging Level 3 — and therefore Netflix — additional money to reach its subscribers, since Netflix competes with Comcast for viewership.

More at Wired and at CNet, and more analysis at GigaOm.

Yesterday, the 10th of November, was the 35th anniversary of the Wreck of Edmund Fitzgerald.

As a kid, I assumed the song was about some long-ago shipwreck, and not about something that happened in my own lifetime, on a freshwater lake.

“Pontiac, 84, Dies of Indifference“.

Fox & Friends’ coverage of the Stewart/Colbert rally really just beggars belief.

Balko has more; it’s yet another tale of goofball prosecutorial tomfoolery and law-enforcement vendettas against pain management people.

In this particular case, a Bush-appointed US Attorney is actively persecuting a third party for questioning her prosecution of a pain specialist.

Yeah, you read that right. She’s brought charges against someone for criticizing her, and has further managed to get the court to rule the whole thing is too sensitive to be public. How chilling is that?

The whole imbroglio started under Bush, but — as I noted when he was making those power grabs — the Executive branch almost never lets go of power, so the abuse has continued under Obama’s watch.

The case is now in front of SCOTUS. Balko quotes Jacob Sullum:

This level of secrecy, which the Associated Press says “has alarmed First Amendment supporters” who see it as “highly unusual” and “patently wrong,” is clearly not justified by the need to protect the confidentiality of grand jury proceedings. The 10th Circuit decided to seal even the Reason/I.J. amicus brief, which is based entirely on publicly available information. More generally, the gist of the case could have been discussed without revealing grand jury material, as Reynolds’ Supreme Court petition shows. Although the court-ordered redactions make the 10th Circuit’s reasoning as described in the petition hard to follow at times, the details generally can be filled in with information that has been reported in the press (which shows how silly the pretense of secrecy is). Furthermore, one of the main justifications for grand jury secrecy — that it protects innocent people who are investigated but never charged — does not apply in a case like this, where the target of the investigation wants more openness and it’s the government that is trying to hide information. As Corn-Revere argues, such secrecy turns the intended role of the grand jury on its head, making it an instrument of oppression instead of a bulwark against it…

I’d like to show you the Reason/I.J. brief defending Reynolds’ First Amendment rights, but I’m not allowed to!

Off-duty cop Feris Jones was getting her hair in Brooklyn done on Saturday when a thief became very unlucky:

The gunman ordered the four people there […] to place their belongings in a black bag, the police said. He then ordered them into a bathroom in the back while he searched the shop for more worth stealing.

In the bathroom, Mr. Browne said, Officer Jones pulled out her revolver. She whispered to the other three women to lie down and gave the proprietor her cellphone and told her to call 911. Then she stepped out of the bathroom, identified herself as a police officer and ordered the robber to drop his gun, the police said. He refused and opened fire from about 12 feet away, Mr. Browne said, shooting four times in quick succession.

One bullet whizzed past Officer Jones’s head. She fired back, emptying her five-shot revolver. One shot knocked the gun from the man’s two-handed grip, piercing his right middle finger and grazing his left hand, according to the police. Another shot hit the lock on the front door, jamming it. The gunman tried to flee, Mr. Browne said, but could not get the door open. Finally, he grabbed his gun, kicked out a lower panel on the door and crawled out. Officer Jones followed him out the door to see which way he was running.

Winston Cox, 19, was eventually apprehended in a Brooklyn motel after police tracked him via his blood trail to his mother’s home.

The story does not say, but I really hope Officer Jones blew the smoke from her barrel as Cox ran away.

Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out, jackass.

She spoke jive.

Barbara Billingsley, dead at 94.