That was fast…

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Six rare, wild elephants were found poisoned to death in an Sumatran jungle Wednesday, their mouths black and covered with potassium cyanide, a conservationist said.

Nurkalis Fadli from the World Wild Fund said he believed all the animals, who appeared to be from the same family, were intentionally killed.

The only male in the group had its tusks removed, he said.

“This is an extraordinary crime,” Nurkalis told reporters in Riau province on Sumatra sland. “Whoever did this must have known that Sumatran Elephants are extremely rare and protected by our laws.”

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In the opening moments of Deep Sea 3D, hordes of see-through UFOs with wiggling tentacles hurl themselves at you, popping off the screen in three dimensions and all directions.

Only after you adjust your 3-D glasses and pinch yourself a few times do you remember that this is not a sci-fi film, but a new IMAX movie documentary about changing life on the ocean floor. Those glassy orbs aren’t aliens, they’re tiny jellyfish. And none of this is CGI.

And still it won’t be as good as the real thing…

Oh, and that picture is probably larger than it is showing in your browser right now – click on it to see it full size

Nice Beaver!

As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

Justice William O. Douglas

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i’m so shaky right now. and having trouble keeping the tears away.

i was just on the bus. doing typical travel things. you know, listening to my ipod, staring out the window, day dreaming about ice cream and puppy dogs. a few stops before mine, a sheriff’s car pulls in front of the bus with its lights on. he gets on, moves to the back and an undercover informs a woman that she’s being cited for wearing headphones. apparently, having both headphones on while in a bus is a crime. they take her info. they are about to leave when the undercover notices me with my ipod. do you have your id, he rudely asked. i asked why. he informs me that what i’m doing is illegal. that i can only have one earphone in at a time. i was looking at him completely dumbfounded. shaking, i looked through my bag for my id then he took down all of my info. when he saw that my id was from canada, he asked why i was in the country.

[..]

i called scopitone immediately, completely in tears over this. when he called the sheriff’s department to find out what the fuck was going on, he was told that today they are having a zero tolerance campaign. they are making examples out of people, so that possible rapists, or other such types will fear the possibility of undercover cops on the bus. so i was made an example of.

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Americans know more about The Simpsons TV show than the US Constitution’s First Amendment, an opinion poll says.

Only one in four could name more than one of the five freedoms it upholds but more than half could name at least two members of the cartoon family.

About one in five thought the right to own a pet was one of the freedoms.

Wow.

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The testimony of everyday German men and women who perpetrated Nazi horror has almost never come to light. Nazi leaders testified in their own postwar trials; a few wrote memoirs. Soldiers left diaries and letters that historians have since unearthed. But the vast majority of Nazi perpetrators — the millions of low-level functionaries who did the daily, dirty work of genocide — took their stories with them to the grave. Few divulged their pasts, even to their own families.

Margarete Barthel, now 83 and housebound by arthritis, is a rare exception. She alone has felt driven to try to explain. Not only how she became an SS guard, but also the perverse paradox of her life: That while today she feels guilt for “all those murdered people,” the macabre truth is that, “for me, the time in Ravensbrueck was the most beautiful time.”

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Does the British government not have a duty of care to the troops in Iraq? My son had to purchase his own boots before going out to Iraq as the standard army-issued boots were unsuitable and melted in the intense heat. The British troops were known to the American troops as “the borrowers” due to their lack of equipment and short supplies. When the death of the 100th soldier was announced on television, I was appalled to hear that instruction had come from you not to hype up the significance of the number. If this is correct, you have little humanity and do not deserve an army who are not able to question the politics and decisions made, but have to go where they are told. I was interested to hear about Maya Anne Evans, who was arrested for peacefully reading out the names of the dead soldiers, including my son, at the Cenotaph. She was arrested by 14 police officers, received a criminal record, and was fined £100.

[..]

As far as I am aware, neither you nor any government representative has attended any of the soldiers’ funerals or visited the many injured. (This was recently reported as 230, while in January 2005 the figure stood at 790. I am sure who does the figures, but perhaps they should be redeployed.) The true cost of this war in terms of wasted lives of both Iraqis and of coalition troops, and the true, undisclosed financial cost, far outweigh any gains. We cannot police the whole world because they do not agree with us or will not cooperate with us. I await your response with interest.

This is an edited version of a letter delivered by Pauline Hickey to 10 Downing Street yesterday

more…

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The largest known giver to a controversial charity founded by U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum made its $25,000 donation as the senator was working to win as much as $8.5 million in federal aid for the donor’s project in the Philadelphia suburbs.

Federal tax records show that Preferred Real Estate Inc., the developer of the Wharf at Rivertown project in Chester, Pa., wrote the check to Santorum’s Operation Good Neighbor Foundation in 2002.

On his campaign Web site, Santorum boasts of winning $8.5 million in federal aid for the riverfront redevelopment of an abandoned Peco Energy plant — an effort that culminated in the earmarking of $6 million in highway money last year.

But good-government experts were troubled by the appearance of a developer giving money to the senator’s charity at the same time it was lobbying for federal dollars. Unlike a campaign contribution, checks to a charity can be written by a corporation and are not subject to any limit.

“It’s a neat window into how Washington works,�? said Gary Ruskin of the Congressional Accountability Project, one of several watchdogs troubled by the potential conflicts when a member of Congress also solicits funds for a charity he runs. “It shows that, more and more, Washington is for sale.�?

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The MSM, as usual, has it all wrong about Bush’s visit to India. There were no protests against Bush, just love and admiration as shown by the following photos:

Members of the Young Republicans of India proclaim Bush’s strong leadership qualities. Even when he has to go it alone, Bush is like a wolf among the passive sheep who would coddle terrorists.

Demonstrators chant pro-Bush slogans upon his arrival — “What do we want?” “Tax cuts!” “When do we want them?” “Now!”

Demonstrators waiting to greet the president take some time to roast marshmallows.

Souvenirs of President Bush were selling like hotcakes. This man points with his foot where he wants Bush to autograph his photo.

Big, beautiful spiral galaxy M101 is one of the last entries in Charles Messier’s famous catalog, but definitely not one of the least.
About 170,000 light-years across, this galaxy is enormous, almost twice the size of our own Milky Way galaxy.
M101 was also one of the original spiral nebulae observed by Lord Rosse’s large 19th century telescope, the Leviathan of Parsontown.
Assembled from 51 exposures recorded by the Hubble Space Telescope in the 20th and 21st centuries, with additional data from ground based telescopes, this mosaic of M101 is touted as the largest, most detailed spiral galaxy view ever released from Hubble.
The sharp image shows stunning features along the galaxy’s face-on disk of stars and dust along with background galaxies, some visible right through M101 itself.
Also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy, M101 lies within the boundaries of the northern constellation Ursa Major, about 25 million light-years away.

For sale here.

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This frame taken from secure government video obtained by The Associated Press shows then-Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown, center, at the Homeland Security EOC (emergency operations center) in Washington Aug. 28, 2005, taking part in a government video briefing the day before Hurricane Katrina struck on Aug. 29. (AP Photo)

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In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned
President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans’ Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

Bush didn’t ask a single question during the final briefing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: “We are fully prepared.”

The footage — along with seven days of transcripts of briefings obtained by The Associated Press — show in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster.

[..]

Some of the footage and transcripts from briefings Aug. 25-31 conflicts with the defenses that federal, state and local officials have made in trying to deflect blame and minimize the political fallout from the failed Katrina response

Video-WMP Video-QT

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Now we’ve got that out the way, let us ask you a question. Why is it that every time the media starts to talk about the internet they feel compelled to bang on about paedophiles and terrorists and generally come over like a cross between Joe McCarthy and the Childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?

Well here’s one answer – it sells copy. Another answer is that we’re totally scared of new media, because new media is railways and we’re canals, and you all just know how that’s going to end.

So we seek to equate the internet with all bad things to scare you off it. At some corporate freudian level, there’s some truth to that accusation.

[..]

A couple of months ago a person of my very close acquaintance [cough cough] was giving his in-laws their weekly fix of Desperate Housewives when he noticed that their Plusnet connection was resolutely not shifting the torrent.

But as soon as he switched to another torrenting program called Bitcomet, the data just came pouring through. What was going on? Well the answer was simple. There’s a mysterious man somewhere on this planet called “RnySmile”. He creates and updates the Bitcomet programme, and he’d reprogrammed the damn thing to encrypt the torrents so that it was goodbye “traffic shaping”.

Now this was such a good idea that all the other BitTorrent programmers leapt on it within weeks. As of last weekend the three biggest torrent programs carry automatic encryption and Plusnet and friends are looking at a big hole in their metaphorical dyke.

[..]

However all this made us think the following: if torrent traffic is 30% and more of the internet, and it’s going encrypted at a rate of knots, then where does that leave the spooks, spies and other law enforcement professionals who sit around monitoring the internet all day?

The article assumed that it’s ok for for security services to “manage” by monitoring, breaking decryption, and reading internet traffic.
The assumption here is that spying on the innocent is OK.

Fuck that. Seriously.

The article is in response to reactions to a Newsnight broadcast, so this posting would not be complete without a torrent

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Two federal judges in Florida have upheld the authority of individual courts to use the Patriot Act to order searches anywhere in the country for e-mails and computer data in all types of criminal investigations, overruling a magistrate who found that Congress limited such expanded jurisdiction to cases involving terrorism.

The disagreement among the jurists about the scope of their powers simmered for more than two years before coming to light in an opinion unsealed earlier this month.

Next time a law maker tells you they will only use a new law to target terrorists, tell them to shove it where the moon doesn’t shine. Here is the EFF article about this..