Here is why people want Apple to make a phone…

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A U.S. Christian group has grown tired of escalating gasoline prices and is set to stage a national prayer rally to lower the numbers at the pumps.

Various Christian clergy from around the country will convene around a Washington, D.C., gas station Thursday at noon to pray. For those who can’t attend, a live Internet site and toll-free prayer line have been established.

In a release, the Pray Live group said many people are “overlooking the power of prayer when it comes to resolving this energy crisis.”

Apart from sending a message to God, the rally had a message for humanity, said Wenda Royster, the group’s founder.

“It is our hope that seeing and hearing some of the nation’s most powerful preachers gathered around a gas station and the United States capital as a backdrop, will remind everyone who is really in charge of our world — God,” Royster said.

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A blistering comedy “tribute�? to President Bush by Comedy Central’s faux talk show host Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondent Dinner Saturday night left George and Laura Bush unsmiling at its close.

Earlier, the president had delivered his talk to the 2700 attendees, including many celebrities and top officials, with the help of a Bush impersonator.

Colbert, who spoke in the guise of his talk show character, who ostensibly supports the president strongly, urged the Bush to ignore his low approval ratings, saying they were based on reality, “and reality has a well-known liberal bias.�?

He attacked those in the press who claim that the shake-up at the White House was merely re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. “This administration is soaring, not sinking,�? he said. “They are re-arranging the deck chairs–on the Hindenburg.�?

[..]

As Colbert walked from the podium, when it was over, the president and First Lady gave him quick nods, unsmiling, and left immediately.

E&P’s Joe Strupp, in the crowd, observed that quite a few sitting near him looked a little uncomfortable at times, perhaps feeling the material was a little too biting–or too much speaking “truthiness” to power.

A short clip is here, the full video is here.

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A Croatian war veteran, Dragan Prebeg, 35, sits in his car engulfed in flames after he poured petrol on himself in order to commit suicide in Zagreb, the capital, on Thursday.

Prebeg, the father of six children, died later in a Zagreb hospital.

He killed himself to protest at a decision by the country’s tax authorities to refuse to pay him back €1,600 (£1,110), which he had said that he was owed.

Zimbabwe, the USA

and don’t for a moment think that Europe is any better…

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I just sent someone an e-mail that happened to mentioned the US Secretary of Defense. My spell checker didn’t like the name Rumsfeld. It gave me the following suggestions:

1) Misfield
2) Misfiled
3) Ruffled
4) Rumbled
5) Rumpled
i) Ignore
r) Replace

Opinionated little sucker, isn’t it?

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Rock bands Cheap Trick and The Allman Brothers Band are suing Sony Music, claiming they are being shortchanged on royalties for songs downloaded legally over the Internet.

The suit, filed at a federal court in Manhattan, claims Sony has failed to live up to a contract requiring that it pay its musicians half of the net revenue it receives from licensing songs to download services like iTunes and
Napster.

Sony has been paying the aging rockers less than that amount, in part because their record deals predate the existence of legal music sales over the Internet.

According to the suit, the record company is treating digital downloads like traditional record sales, rather than licensed music, triggering a different royalty deal.

Under that old rubrik, the record company deducts fees for the kind of extra costs they used to incur when records were pressed on vinyl, including packaging charges, restocking costs and losses due to breakage.

[More pictures:]

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Warning: all following pictures are done with an alpha version of Terragen 2. A lot of improvements will come with the final version.

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“My fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

It’s three years ago next monday. The press reactions were hilarious…

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President Bush is expected on Friday to announce his approval of a deal under which a Dubai-owned company would take control of nine plants in the United States that manufacture parts for American military vehicles and aircraft, say two administration officials familiar with the terms of the deal.

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Gebrek aan tolerantie is de grootste bron van schaamte voor Nederlanders. Ook de schaamte voor de Nederlandse politiek is aanzienlijk (50%). Eén van de respondenten zegt hierover: ‘De Nederlandse politiek werkt met een enorme afstand van de bevolking en kijkt op hen neer zonder zich te realiseren wat zij veroorzaakt.’

JACKIEFISHERWHOAREYOUDREADNOUGHT

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Two years after the Abu Ghraib scandal, new research shows that abuse of detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq, Afghanistan, and at Guantánamo Bay has been widespread, and that the United States has taken only limited steps to investigate and punish implicated personnel.

A briefing paper issued today, “By the Numbers,” presents findings of the Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project, a joint project of New York University’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First. The project is the first comprehensive accounting of credible allegations of torture and abuse in U.S. custody in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo.

“Two years ago, U.S. officials said the abuses at Abu Ghraib were aberrations and that people who abused detainees would be brought to justice,” said Professor Meg Satterthwaite, faculty director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU Law School. “Yet our research shows that detainee abuses were widespread, and few people have truly been brought to justice.”

The project has collected hundreds of allegations of detainee abuse and torture occurring since late 2001 – allegations implicating more than 600 U.S. military and civilian personnel and involving more than 460 detainees.

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“After our transparently bogus story and our impossibly shitty video appeared on the website… we received a flood of messages from big-shot bigfoot hunters who were dying to find out about [the] footage. Our plan was working.” So, Penn and Teller faked the Sonoma bigfoot footage. But only the BFRO fell for it. Conveniently, they deleted the evidence of that. With so many sasquatch enthusiasts expressing doubt about the video when it was released, can our favorite Libertarian and mime really use it to prove that bigfoot is bullshit?

I haven’t seen this episode of Bullshit yet, but this makes it sound interesting…

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Airlines and aircraft makers are always looking to get the most passengers possible onto planes, but Airbus is denying a report that it is in discussions with carriers about having a standing room “seat” to fit even more passengers on its jets.

The New York Times reported that Airbus has quietly pitched the standing-room-only option to Asian carriers, though none have agreed to it yet. But a spokeswoman for Airbus flatly denied the report Tuesday, going so far as to call it “crap.”

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Justice Peter Smith’s 71-page ruling in the recent “Da Vinci Code” copyright case here is notable for many things: the judge’s occasional forays into literary criticism, his snippy remarks about witnesses on both sides, and his fluent knowledge not only of copyright law but also of more esoteric topics like the history of the Knights Templar.

But there is more to it than that. Embedded in the first 13½ pages of the ruling is Justice Smith’s very own secret code, one that when partly solved reveals its name: the Smithy Code.

[..]

The first clue that a puzzle exists lies in the typeface of the ruling. Most of the document is printed in regular roman letters, the way one would expect. But some letters in the first 13½ pages appear in boldface italics, jarringly, in the midst of all the normal words. Thus, in the first paragraph of the decision, which refers to Mr. Leigh and Mr. Baigent, the “s” in the word “claimants” is italicized and boldfaced.

If you pluck all the italicized letters out of the text, you find that the first 10 spell “Smithy Code,” an apparent play on “Da Vinci Code.” But the next series of letters, some 30 or so, are a jumble, and this is the mystery that needs to be solved to break the code.

In a brief telephone interview on Wednesday, Justice Smith declined to provide a solution for a puzzled reporter. Nor would he explain how he had put the code in his ruling, or how long it took him to figure out how to do it.

“I can’t discuss the judgment until after I retire,” he said.

Some people have way too much time…

(here’s another one)

(and never forget Duality)

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A Catholic activist organization has written to Oregon’s governor and state lawmakers to protest a University of Oregon student newspaper for having published cartoons showing Jesus Christ naked and with an erection.

In its March edition, the Insurgent, an “alternative” student paper on the Eugene, Ore., campus printed 12 hand-drawn cartoons of Jesus as a response to rival paper the Commentator having published the controversial cartoons of Muhammad originally published in Europe that sparked Muslim riots worldwide. The Insurgent claimed it published the drawings to “provoke dialogue.”

William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, said the university’s president, Dave Frohnmayer, had been unresponsive to complaints about the drawings, so he had written to the governor, every state legislators and the chancellor of the Oregon University System, among others.

“The March edition of the Insurgent … was one of the most obscene assaults on Christianity I have ever seen,” Donohue said in a statement.

Let’s see if those who claimed that the Mohammed cartoons were worthy of First Amendment protection were really being sincere or whether they just don’t like Islam. I’ll be shocked if there is any consistency in most pundit’s responses.

I finally figured out why, after invading both Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush
now wants to invade Iran. It’s got nothing to do with terrorism, oil, 9/11,
Osama, WMDs or nukes.

If he gets all three in a row, he can start building houses and hotels.

Remember this picture I posted a while back? The photographer has won another prize with it – this time a Pulitzer.

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Housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson shed little light Monday on the future of public housing in hurricane-battered New Orleans, but said that “only the best residents” of the former St. Thomas housing complex should be allowed into the new mixed-income development that replaced it.

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“Some of the people shouldn’t return,” Jackson said. “The (public housing) developments were gang-ridden by some of the most notorious gangs in this country. People hid and took care of those persons because they took care of them. Only the best residents should return. Those who paid rent on time, those who held a job and those who worked.”

I can undersand not wanting gangs in a project, but limiting the definition of “best” to “those who worked” is insane. By those lights, tens of thousands of Michigan workers went in one day from some of the state’s “best residents” to “undesirables,” not based on their own behavior, but on the ruthless realities spawned by globalization. Your value as citizen and resident under this categorization is based solely on the economics of big business, as corporations do their periodic employee bloodletting to bolster the bottom line. Is the teenager who rings up your order at Taco Bell a “better resident” than the stay-at-home mom who believes giving her attention to her children is helping to shape better human beings? Does the auto-parts salesman add more to his city than the retiree who volunteers for the literacy program 20 hours a week? Apparently, everyone is just one pink slip away from being considered a “bad resident.”

source

Perhaps under pressure from the insurance company, St. Luke’s plans to terminate the life of a 53-year old woman, Andrea Clark, against the wishes of her family and against her own wishes as stated just a few days ago. Unlike the Terri Schiavo case, Andrea Clarke is NOT brain-dead. Her family wants your help in stopping the state-authorized killing of their loved one.

Whose choice is it to terminate life? Hospitals? Insurance companies? Under a 1999 Texas “Futile Care” law (Text of the law ), signed by then-governor George W. Bush, hospitals can unilaterally decide to “pull the plug”.  Two people previously allowed to die under this law were 5-month old Sun Hudson and Tirhas Habtegris, both cases against the wishes of the family.

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Andrea’s attorney explained it to us this way:

An insurance company negotiates with the hospital how much they will pay for certain services. Say, for instance, someone in the ICU costs $10,000 for treatment per day. The insurance company says to the hospital, “Okay, we will pay you $7500 for you to provide that service to our insured patient.”

There’s a catch, though. The insurance company will pay the negotiated amount to the hospital, but if a patient goes on and on, needing that service, the insurance company begins making noise. This insured patient is costing them too much; they are losing profit. They begin to put pressure on the hospital to get that patient off of their books. The hospital either does this by getting aggressive with the patient’s treatment, getting them well, and discharging them, OR by “pulling the plug” on that patient.

In other words, that patient has now become, in terms of profit, both for the hospital and the insurance company “worth more dead.” If that patient continues to receive that intensive care, it costs the hospital in terms of where they stand the next time they negotiate prices with the insurance company. The next time negotiations come up, the insurance company will say, “Hey, we would give you the going rate on an intensive care patient this year, but you gouged us for 90 days on Andrea Clark last year, so we are lowering our starting point for payment to $7000, to make up for it.”

Perhaps she should change her name to Terri Schiavo… anybody want to bet the Netherlands will get ripped by Fox next time our Euthanasia laws come up again? At least over here the patient get to decide themselves, and “can’t afford the treatment” is never a reason…