Need? No, we don’t NEED them, really…

But we really like the idea of magnets strong enough to require warnings.

Beware – you must think ahead when moving these magnets. If carrying one into another room, carefully plan the route you will be taking. Computers & monitors will be affected in an entire room. Loose metallic objects and other magnets may become airborne and fly considerable distances – and at great speed – to attach themselves to this magnet. If you get caught in between the two, you can get injured. Two of these magnets close together can create an almost unbelievable magnetic field that can be very dangerous. Of all the unique items we offer for sale, we consider these two items the most dangerous of all. Our normal packing & shipping personnel refuse to package these magnets – our engineers have to do it. This is no joke and we cannot stress it strongly enough – that you must be extremely careful – and know what you’re doing with these magnets. Take Note: Two of the 3″ x 1″ disc magnets can very easily break your arm if they get out of control.

Yours for only $75 each.

Things Watched On Sunday Due to Hangover Of Which We Are, In Retrospect, Ashamed

Chupacabra: Dark Seas,” on SciFi. Synopsis: A chupacabra! On a cruise ship! With Giancarlo Esposito as a crazy scientist! And John Rhys-Davies as the captain!

It’s as if they’re going out of their way to make horrible film after horrible film over there. We’ve seen better student films. We’ve seen better films made by toddlers. We’ve seen better films made by chupacabras, or at least we theorize that primitive bloodsucking animals with no language or culture could not possibly do worse than this.

From the IMDB review of this goatsucker: “

By a stroke of sheer coincidence, a Marshall is on board, investigating some money that went missing from the ship’s safe. He’s posing as an insurance salesman (“Lady, I’m the best insurance you’ve got…”). Other scintillating characters include the captain (John Rhys-Davies, and sadly his dignity is the first victim of the film), his tae-bo instructor daughter …

No, we are not making this up.

Nice one, BellSouth

Via BoingBoing:

Hours after New Orleans officials announced Tuesday that they would deploy a city-owned, wireless Internet network in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, regional phone giant BellSouth Corp. withdrew an offer to donate one of its damaged buildings that would have housed new police headquarters, city officials said yesterday. According to the officials, the head of BellSouth’s Louisiana operations, Bill Oliver, angrily rescinded the offer of the building in a conversation with New Orleans homeland security director Terry Ebbert, who oversees the roughly 1,650-member police force.

Try to say this with a straight face. We dare you.

It’s like they think nobody’s paying attention. In this AP story about AG-for-Torture Gonzales defending the Texas redistricting decision, we find this quote from some DoJ spokesdrone:

“All decisions made by the Justice Department involve thoughtful rigorous analysis of the law,” said spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos. “There is no place for politics in this process and to suggest otherwise is unfortunate and just plain wrong.”

Sure, Tasia. And in any minute, monkeys are gonna fly out of my ass.

Geek Pride

We’re pretty sure we don’t want these, but it makes us happy that they exist.

We do wonder, though: If we got them, would we be entitled to a saving throw when pulled over?

More evil from the Bushies

A 2003 memo from Justice Department lawyers concluded that Tom DeLay’s redistricting scheme in Texas violated the Voting Rights Act, but senior officials (read: Bush partisans) overruled them and imposed a gag order on their findings. The Washington Post has the story, but it’s also all over the blogosphere.

Excerpt:

Justice Department lawyers concluded that the landmark Texas congressional redistricting plan spearheaded by Rep. Tom DeLay (R) violated the Voting Rights Act, according to a previously undisclosed memo obtained by The Washington Post. But senior officials overruled them and approved the plan. The memo, unanimously endorsed by six lawyers and two analysts in the department’s voting section, said the redistricting plan illegally diluted black and Hispanic voting power in two congressional districts. It also said the plan eliminated several other districts in which minorities had a substantial, though not necessarily decisive, influence in elections. “The State of Texas has not met its burden in showing that the proposed congressional redistricting plan does not have a discriminatory effect,” the memo concluded. The memo also found that Republican lawmakers and state officials who helped craft the proposal were aware it posed a high risk of being ruled discriminatory compared with other options. But the Texas legislature proceeded with the new map anyway because it would maximize the number of Republican federal lawmakers in the state, the memo said. The redistricting was approved in 2003, and Texas Republicans gained five seats in the U.S. House in the 2004 elections, solidifying GOP control of Congress. J. Gerald “Gerry” Hebert, one of the lawyers representing Texas Democrats who are challenging the redistricting in court, said of the Justice Department’s action: “We always felt that the process . . . wouldn’t be corrupt, but it was. . . . The staff didn’t see this as a close call or a mixed bag or anything like that. This should have been a very clear-cut case.” . . . The 73-page memo, dated Dec. 12, 2003, has been kept under tight wraps for two years. Lawyers who worked on the case were subjected to an unusual gag rule. The memo was provided to The Post by a person connected to the case who is critical of the adopted redistricting map. Such recommendation memos, while not binding, historically carry great weight within the Justice Department.

Rummy Gets Smacked

Speaking to reporters, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff repeatedly contradicted Sec. Rumsfeld on what, exactly, was the obligation of US forces if they observe or hear of prisoner abuse. General Pace’s position is that they must intervene; Rummy just wants them to object.

The larger issue here is that Rumsfeld, ostensibly Gen. Pace’s superior, tried to correct the Marine, only to get stuffed in the process. In front of the press.

Awesome.

And don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out!

So, in North Carolina, there’s a law that election machines must have open, examinable code so that people can trust that the machines do what they say they do. Diebold lobbied for and received an exemption from this law — which a judge then struck down. In response, Diebold is pulling out of North Carolina. What does this tell you about their voting machine code? Nothing good.

More here, wherein it’s made clear that the NC law mandated not public disclosure of the code but only escrow. What is Diebold afraid of?

If 99% of all advertising is insulting crap…

… then this Sony Brevia commercial is the high end of the remaining set. Blogland was all atwitter a few months back with stills of the shoot, which involved releasing an enormous number of multicolored superballs down hills in San Francisco. This is the finished product. It’s lovely, and is sullied by commerce only in the final seconds.

There’s a making-of video linked in one of JWZ’s entries above; it’s worth your time, too.

Not that this is a surprise, mind you

Rude Pundit points out what useless and vile jackasses the folks at Newsmax are; they’re running an editorial called “John McCain: Torture Worked On Me” whose thesis is that McCain ought not be opposed to torture since, you know, he eventually cracked under NV torture as a POW.

Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot.

Sony CDs: Still Dangerous

Freedom to Tinker reports that Sony’s MediaMax DRM installs even if you tell it not to. Again, NEVER install software from a music CD, and MAKE SURE you’ve disabled autorun in you’re running Windows.

We note that folks not on Windows are much, much safer on this point — all these copy-protection schemes require the user to install (albeit unwittingly) software that prevents him or her from using the CD normally; in the absence of said software, there is no DRM. Neither Linux nor OS X have anything so wrongheaded as CD autorun (which even MS has moved away from, we understand), so even if such programs are developed, the user would have to deliberately install them. That’s why they’re frequently called innocuous things like “PlayCD.exe” — what user in their right mind would install it if it were named honestly? Flash hokum and screensavers be damned, there is nothing on a music CD you need to install.

Here’s how to disable autorun in Windows XP. If you’re not sure it’s off, CHECK NOW.

More on our growing “Papers Please” police state

Cops in Miami have a disturbing plan to remind citizens of police power:

MIAMI –Miami police announced Monday they will stage random shows of force at hotels, banks and other public places to keep terrorists guessing and remind people to be vigilant. Article Tools Deputy Police Chief Frank Fernandez said officers might, for example, surround a bank building, check the IDs of everyone going in and out and hand out leaflets about terror threats. “This is an in-your-face type of strategy. It’s letting the terrorists know we are out there,” Fernandez said. The operations will keep terrorists off guard, Fernandez said. He said al-Qaida and other terrorist groups plot attacks by putting places under surveillance and watching for flaws and patterns in security. Police Chief John Timoney said there was no specific, credible threat of an imminent terror attack in Miami. But he said the city has repeatedly been mentioned in intelligence reports as a potential target.

Five Years and Still Snarky

Five years ago today, we turned our email list into the first incarnation of Miscellaneous Heathen. Nearly 3,000 posts later, here we are. With what AWStats says is 5K+ unique visitors a month and around 80K hits a month, we figure a few more people than the original Arrant Knaves list are stopping by to participate in this rather public hobby.

Feeling nostalgic? Feel free to give the Archives a visit.

Weird Scientology Three-fer

First, an excerpt from the Scientology-themed South Park ep. Very funny, made moreso by its complete adherence to actual CoS doctrine.

Second, this weird item at BoingBoing from the WaPo in re: some enormous crop-circle type decorations in New Mexico marking the location of the CoS’ archive vault.

Finally, this 1983 Penthouse interview with L. Ron, Jr., which I suspect was part of the source material for Troy Schulze’ Me-Sci-Ah.

Things that should scare you

Via Democratic Veteran, who’s quoting from the Post:

The Defense Department has expanded its programs aimed at gathering and analyzing intelligence within the United States, creating new agencies, adding personnel and seeking additional legal authority for domestic security activities in the post-9/11 world. The moves have taken place on several fronts. The White House is considering expanding the power of a little-known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, which was created three years ago. The proposal, made by a presidential commission, would transform CIFA from an office that coordinates Pentagon security efforts — including protecting military facilities from attack — to one that also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage. The Pentagon has pushed legislation on Capitol Hill that would create an intelligence exception to the Privacy Act, allowing the FBI and others to share information gathered about U.S. citizens with the Pentagon, CIA and other intelligence agencies, as long as the data is deemed to be related to foreign intelligence. Backers say the measure is needed to strengthen investigations into terrorism or weapons of mass destruction.

The Post continues:

Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the data-sharing amendment would still give the Pentagon much greater access to the FBI’s massive collection of data, including information on citizens not connected to terrorism or espionage. The measure, she said, “removes one of the few existing privacy protections against the creation of secret dossiers on Americans by government intelligence agencies.” She said the Pentagon’s “intelligence agencies are quietly expanding their domestic presence without any public debate.”

More Bushshit

Just so you don’t forget, we’re still making our HIV/AIDS relief efforts contingent on the recipient nation being ardently anti-choice.

The announcement, in 2003, that the US Administration under President Bush was to give $15 billion (£9 billion) to help the fight against AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean was welcomed by campaigner Sir Bob Geldof, and others, as a major breakthrough. But, critics argue, it has become increasingly clear that the Bush policy is, in many ways, proving more damaging that helpful, as this Editorial Comment from the Baltimore Sun reveals. AIDS has hit Africa hard. But non-governmental organizations confronting the epidemic have been hit even harder by the Bush administration’s ideologically based edicts. Last month, the UN special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis, and others declared that the administration’s policy of emphasizing abstinence-only programmes and cutting federal funding for condoms has undermined Uganda’s HIV/AIDS effort. Sadly, Uganda is not alone.

This makes it clear that the priority is not helping people; it’s controlling people.

Geeks Rule

At Google they do, anyway. The search king’s enormous financial clout is turning Silicon Valley’s VC culture on its ear, which is sort of funny. The article has VCs complaining that now, a startup might just go from founder to Google without the VC step. Horrors!

Best Stuff From Other Sites Dept.

JWZ found a site answering the question “How Hard Is It To Shoot Off A Lock?” Answer: Very, unless you’re using a shotgun slug.

However, we note after consulting with Senior Heathen Shootin’ & Lawyerin’ Correspondent Triple-F that the test is sort of stacked against pistols via round choice. A jacketed hollow-point or ball round isn’t meant to penetrate anything but, um, soft targets, whereupon it’s expected to expand. Rifle rounds are typically fully jacketed and NOT meant to expand, so all things being equal you’d expect such a round to go through more stuff than a bullet engineered for expansion. At the same time, all the rifle rounds used are smaller in diameter than the larger handgun rounds.

The test remains valid in a mythbusting sense, though, as movie gunmen would typically be loaded with “normal” pistol bullets like those used, not some armor-piercing round. (A bullet meant to go through stuff is less useful for stopping bad guys than a more traditional round.) We’re just curious about the corner case of a hard-alloy or fully-jacketed pistol round from a large caliber, high-velocity pistol.

Mostly because we’re very, very geeky. So geeky, in fact, that we sent email asking this version question. Watch this space for a follow-up.

Lest Ye Forget

Diebold would still like to destroy our democracy. (Mefi link)

In June, over 200 people traveled to Sacramento to voice their concerns at a public hearing before a panel of advisors to the Secretary of State on voting systems. Since then, every scheduled meeting of the Voting Systems Panel has been cancelled, and now the Secretary has simply disbanded the VSP without notice, without hearings, without any type of due process.