More on Habeas

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The Rude Pundit on the decision:

…[I]f you think yesterday’s Supreme Court decision was a pile of shit, then you believe that the United States has the right to hold foreign nationals without allowing them to challenge their imprisonment in fair, open courts. You believe that a special court with special rules of evidence and special procedures is the only means through which a presidentially-designated “alien enemy combatant” held at a United States-run facility can even say, “Umm, do you have any proof I’m anything more than a fuckin’ goat herder who was wandering in the right field at the wrong time?” You believe that the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions (except in the narrowest possible interpretation) do not apply to prisoners held at Gitmo. And you’re absolutely hysterical, batshit insane over the idea that a human being held without ever being told why might get to ask.

That’s it. Every right-winger’s rant about “terra! terra! moooslims!! terra!” really boils down to wanting Big Daddy Gummit to be able to snatch anyone from anywhere and hold them for as long as they want, with no recourse for the victim. That’s 100% antithetical to everything our government is supposed to stand for (and let’s just set aside for a moment that the GOP is supposed to be the government-hostile, drown-it-in-a-bathtub party); the right of habeas corpus was enshrined as natural law hundreds of years before our noble experiment took off, and our own Constitution notes in no uncertain terms that the right cannot be revoked except under extraordinary circumstances.

It’s significant, by the way, that the Constitution phrases it that way: the right cannot be taken away by the state. It says nothing about the State granting us such rights because the rights are ours, period. The State is not the source of our rights and liberties. It’s an institution we the people have created to ensure the safety of those rights while entering into a social contract to provide other services impractical to handle absent a construct like the State. Unlike apologists for the current Administration, our founders did not view the Bill of Rights, or Habeas, as legal technicalities to be subverted to serve some short-term gain. They viewed them as the natural order of things, a codification of the rights of man endowed by the Creator, whomever you believe that may be, and as truths that should not and cannot be legitimately abrogated.

True patriots still understand this, and behave accordingly. Believing an imprisoned man ought to be able to challenge his captivity in a fair court doesn’t make us weak, and doesn’t give aid and comfort to the enemy. It just means we truly believe in the principles of liberty and equality. Doing otherwise means we don’t. To abandon that core belief is to hate what this country should stand for, and must stand for again.

Dept. of Geeky Gun Humor

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This comparison of the owning experiences of an AK-47, an AR-15, and a Mosin Nagant is well worth your time — I mean, if you have more than a passing familiarity with what any of those things are. (Don’t miss this, Frank.)

“The Barack Obama of Automobiles”

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Go read this longish Atlantic article on what could very well turn out to be the first real game-changer in the automotive world — produced, improbably enough, by General Motors. The GM people my age know is a company made of Fail; few folks in the Heathen orbit and generation have ever even considered a GM product outside of the odd Corvette or Camarao (hi, Edgar) — especially if you eliminate the early, independent years of Saturn as an aberration — GM eventually absorbed the division and destroyed its independence and with it, its value.

Well, that may change. The Volt is a new kind of hybrid that GM is in very-nearly-bet-the-farm mode over. It’s electric-first — there’s an on-board gas engine, but its job is to run a generator, not drive the wheels. The wheels turn with electricity, never gas. Set to go 40 miles on a charge (i.e., more than the average commute), the Volt will mean that most owners buy gas only once in a blue moon. And GM wants it in showrooms for 2010.

They might just make it. And if they deliver on these promises and manage to escape their seemingly inevitable Fail gene, Heathen might just buy one.

This Video Rules

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So, it’s for a David Byrne song, right? And it’s comprised entirely, at the first level of analysis anyway, with naked dancers. However, the real meat of the video is what they do with the black bars covering the dancers’ naughty bits. Just watch. Really.

UPDATE: Well, shit, the video’s gone. I’ll see if I can find another copy.

SCOTUS to POTUS: Drop Dead

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As it turns out, at least five Americans still believe in the Constitution:

The Supreme Court ruled today that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts.

In its third rebuke of the Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners, the court ruled 5-4 that the government is violating the rights of prisoners being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

The fascist wing — Scalia, his mini-me, and Bush’s twins — dissented.

LOLZ

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Remember the Denon cable? There’s a satirical Amazon review:

A caution to people buying these: if you do not follow the “directional markings” on the cables, your music will play backwards. Please check that before mentioning it in your reviews.

I was disappointed. I consider myself an audiophile – I regularly spend over $1000 on cables to get the ultimate sound. I keep my music-listening room in a Faraday cage to prevent any interference that could alter my music-listening experience. Sending any signal down ordinary copper can degrade the signal considerably. While ordinary listeners might not notice, to somebody with even a rudimentary knowledge of sound, the artifacts are glaring. Denon should have used silver wiring (hermetically sealed inside the rubber sheath to prevent any tarnishing, of course), which has a significantly higher conductivity than copper. Furthermore, Denon needs to treat the wires they use in the cable with a polarity inductor to ensure minimal phase variance.

Needless to say, I returned the cable and wrote an angry letter to the so-called engineers at Denon.

Wonder how long that’ll last?

And we wish him luck

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In late 2003, Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen, was detained in Macedonia (en route to vacation) by local officials because he has the same name as some terror watchlist person. The Macedonians eventually released him (1/2004) — at which point he was snatched off the street in Macedonia by Americans, who stripped and beat him before flying him to Baghdad and then, eventually, a CIA interrogation facility in Afghanistan where he was repeatedly beaten and interrogated. By March, he was taking part in a hunger strike to protest his detention. At some point, American officials realized that perhaps they had the wrong guy, but refused to do anything about it. Finally, in late May, they flew him to Albania and released him at night on a deserted road.

al-Masri has brought suit against the US for his kidnapping and torture, only to have the suit dismissed on national security grounds. He has now gone to court in Germany to force his government to seek the extradition of the CIA agents who kidnapped him in 2004; we hope very much he succeeds, but we’re cynical enough to know he won’t. Justice isn’t something our government is particularly interested in when it’s inconvenient.

Apple: Made of Win

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The WWDC keynote was today, and Apple has just raised the bar for the entire mobile phone world in a way even more threatening to the smartphone status quo than the intro of the iPhone 1.0 last year. Even if we skip the SDK — and you shouldn’t, since what you can do with an iPhone makes all the other smartphones look stupid — it’s still a gamechanger.

The new software, for all iPhones, includes:

  • Bulk copy/move/delete operations
  • Contact search
  • Full iWork document support
  • Complete support for Word and Excel documents

Thereby closing some glaring usability gaps in an otherwise tremendous platform. (To be fair, most people don’t have 600 contacts in their phones — but I do, and that made me really miss search.)

Add to this a new service called MobileMe (replaces .Mac; $99/year) that provides over-the-air sync of not just email but also addresses and calendar data. It works with native Mac tools (iCal/Address Book) as well as PCs running Outlook, and includes access to incredibly rich web apps for all that data, in case you need it. Exchange + Blackberry Enterprise Server? Who needs that?

Additionally, iPhone 2.0 includes optional support for Exchange and Cisco VPNs out of the box, including the ability to remote-wipe a lost device.

That sound just then? Someone in Canada shitting their pants.

And that’s not all. The new iPhone 3G, as expected, got introduced today. It includes data speeds approach Wifi as well as an integrated GPS. It’s also slightly slimmer, has a flush headphone port, and the 8GB model is only $199. Available July 11 in the US (and 21 other countries; 48 other countries to follow).

I said I wouldn’t upgrade immediately, and I really meant it. I just got my iPhone a few months ago. But at $199 for the speed bump and GPS, it’ll be hard to say no. I’ll still wait for a month or two post-launch to ensure no problems surface, but DAMN.

Death of the Wild

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The backyard has been reclaimed. We thought we might find a lost civilization back there, or at least George Lucas’ long-gone sense of shame, but it turns out it’s just dirt.

New plants are the next step.

More Catholic Chicanery

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Douglas Kmiec, an otherwise Republican law prof at Pepperdine has been denied communion by his priest because he expressed an endorsement for the pro-choice Barack Obama rather than the (presumably) pro-life McCain. Kmiec remains pro-life; he’s just done the math this time around and believes that on the whole, Obama is the better candidate for our country in spite of his disagreement on the subject of abortion. In other words, like most voters, he knows he can’t get everything he wants, and he’s happier with the set of values promoted by the Democrat this time around.

And for that, his priest and church are punishing him. They are of course free to do so, since the church is a private entity, but it is very, very difficult to see how this should not result in an immediate re-examination of this diocese’s 501(c)(3) status. Churches pay no taxes on their income, but to keep it that way they must stay out of politics; from IRS.gov:

Currently, the law prohibits political campaign activity by charities and churches by defining a 501(c)(3) organization as one “which does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.”

And more from here, also at IRS.gov:

…[V]oter education or registration activities with evidence of bias that (a) would favor one candidate over another; (b) oppose a candidate in some manner; or (c) have the effect of favoring a candidate or group of candidates, will constitute prohibited participation or intervention.

Let them, and any church, behave any way they want — but they shouldn’t get a free ride if they decide to ignore the rules under which they operate.

Dept. of GAAAH

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Leave it to the Germans to create a giant waterslide with a 360 degree loop that begins with a trapdoor chamber. Warning: Speedo alert.

It may or may not be funnier or more interesting if you speak German.

Holy Crap! or, Full Circle

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I just got actual useful information from Houstonist. This is shocking and, frankly, almost unprecedented.

Near my house, or near-ish, anyway, is something called the Carolina Collective. It’s a virtual office for the self-employed and work-at-home types who may need office-type support on an ad-hoc or less-than-renting-a-space basis, or who crave the occasional water-cooler aspects of office life. I can actually conceive of using this from time to time, especially since it appears to include available meeting space if you become a member.

Casual, ad-hoc use is free. Usage more than a couple times a week appears to mean you need to pony up $125 a month, but that includes nontrivial benefits like access to food and the aforementioned conference rooms. There are other packages available as well.

WANT

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This cube toy is made entirely of rare-earth magnets, and therefore requires no mechanism other than magnetism.

Dept. of Important Parenting Resources

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Ask Calvin’s Dad. The accumulated HeathenNieces can expect us to use the dickens out of this. Our favorite:

Q. How come old photographs are always black and white? Didn’t they have color film back then? A. Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It’s just that the world was black and white then. The world didn’t turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too. Q. But then why are old paintings in color?! If the world was black and white, wouldn’t artists have painted it that way? A. Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were insane. Q. But… But how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn’t their paints have been shades of gray back then? A. Of course, but they turned colors like everything else did in the ’30s. Q. So why didn’t old black and white photos turn color too? A. Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?

And:

Q. What causes the wind? A. Trees sneezing.

How To Tell If You’re An Idiot

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You buy or sell books explicitly as home decor without regard to what’s inside.

Our Danish printed, European imported books are sold specifically with interior design in mind.

Many people feel that it’s silly to purchase books for pure decorative value. While we certainly understand this, we also savor the opportunity to change the mind of such individuals! Our books are so beautiful on the outside that their interior ceases to be important.

Jesus wept.

Meet the new Russians. Same as the old Russians.

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International Herald Tribute:

On a talk show last autumn, a prominent political analyst named Mikhail Delyagin offered some tart words about Vladimir Putin. When the program was televised, Delyagin was not.

His remarks were cut and he was digitally erased from the show, like a disgraced comrade airbrushed from an old Soviet photo. (The technicians may have worked a bit hastily; they left his disembodied legs in one shot.)

Delyagin, it turned out, has for some time resided on the so-called stop list, a roster of political opponents and other critics of the government who have been barred from television news and political talk shows by the Kremlin.

The stop list is, as Delyagin put it, “an excellent way to stifle dissent.”

More:

And it is not just politicians. Televizor, a rock group whose name means television set, had its booking on a St. Petersburg television station canceled in April, after its members took part in an Other Russia demonstration.

When some actors cracked a few mild jokes about Putin and Medvedev at Russia’s equivalent of the Academy Awards in March, they were expunged from the telecast.

Political humor in general has been exiled from television here. One of the nation’s most popular satirists, Viktor Shenderovich, once had a show that featured puppet caricatures of various politicians, including Putin. It was canceled in Putin’s first term and Shenderovich has been all but barred from television.

Senior government officials deny the existence of a stop list, saying that people hostile to the Kremlin do not appear on television simply because their views are not newsworthy.

Best Trek Wedding EVAR

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In the wake of the California ruling, George Takei and his partner of 20 years will wed in September. His best man? Walkter Koenig. Matron of honor? Nichelle Nichols.

Linc Chafee on the tax cuts and the early days of the Bush Administration

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Months before 9/11, those in Congress knew well what sort of president the newly-sworn-in Bush would be in how he handled his irresponsible and absurd $1.65 trillion dollar tax cuts; former Republican senator (and Obama endorser) Lincoln Chafee tells the story:

But even back in June, before we knew the president would soon lead our response to the murder of nearly 3,000 American civilians, something very disturbing came through for me in his demeanor and attitude in the Oval Office. I want to describe it as insecurity, but even that is not the right word.

Several times, the president went out of his way to remind me that he was the commander in chief. You don’t have to keep telling me that, I thought. I know who you are. Like others, I have been around people who are good at wielding power. They never have to tell you they are in charge. They just are, and you know it. What I saw and heard that day really unsettled me. I’m the commander in chief… I’m the president… I’m the commander in chief… It was unpresidential.

That September, as I watched the Twin Towers collapse in smoke and dust, I had a sinking feeling about the president’s capacity to respond wisely.

Dept. of Wacky Chemistry

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NYT: A Tiny Fruit That Tricks The Tongue:

CARRIE DASHOW dropped a large dollop of lemon sorbet into a glass of Guinness, stirred, drank and proclaimed that it tasted like a “chocolate shake.”

Nearby, Yuka Yoneda tilted her head back as her boyfriend, Albert Yuen, drizzled Tabasco sauce onto her tongue. She swallowed and considered the flavor: “Doughnut glaze, hot doughnut glaze!”

They were among 40 or so people who were tasting under the influence of a small red berry called miracle fruit at a rooftop party in Long Island City, Queens, last Friday night. The berry rewires the way the palate perceives sour flavors for an hour or so, rendering lemons as sweet as candy.

The “magic” substance in the berries is a protein called — we’re not making this up — “miraculin”, which we think is hilarious. Get us some.

Just go read it

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What Every American Should Know About the Middle East. Some highlights:

  • It’s not a homogeneous region; sectarian and ethnic divisions abound. Sunni are not Shia; Arabs are not Persians.
  • Iraq is predominately Arab and Shia, but Saddam and his ruling party were from the Sunni minority.
  • Iran is NOT Arab and is almost exclusively Shia.
  • Palestine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Jordan are Sunni and Arab

Special bonus fact that makes the invasion of Iraq even more obviously stupid: Al Qaeda is a Sunni group.

MLB: Still douchebags

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They’re suing Chicago little leagues for using team names in common with MLB teams. Not logos; just the names; MLB is insisting they own the idea of a baseball team named, for example, the Giants, or Tigers, and that in order to use those names the little leagues must buy their uniforms from MLB’s much more expensive provider. Gee, thanks.

Fortunately, Techdirt and Stephen Colbert are on the case.

Creepiest Thing EVAR

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Apparently, the oldest mamallian cell line is a transmissable canine tumor spread sexually. Yup: this means it’s an immortal, cancerous STD. Yikes.

Unlike most other contagious cancers such as cervical cancer in humans, CTVT isn’t spread by a virus but (as recently proved) by cancerous cells themselves. Genetic analysis suggests the tumor originated in an individual wolf or domesticated dog, probably in east Asia, between 200 and 2,500 years ago. This long-dead canid’s much-mutated cells are still alive and being passed along during coitus (or sometimes through casual contact) centuries later, making it the longest-lived mammalian cell line known.