Bombs rock Shiite areas in Baghdad, killing at least 45

Bombings kill 8 in central Baghdad

34 People Are Killed in Six Bombings in Baghdad; 2 Britons Die in Helicopter Crash

Gunfire on campus of Va. Tech kills at least 31

Baghdad bombs kill up to 21 and two UK helicopters crash

Baghdad bombs kill 26; UK copters crash

Dozens die in weekend of Baghdad violence

At least 45 killed in Baghdad blasts

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The attack on the Iraqi parliament was very strange. I don’t think it was a suicide bomber. Take a look at this video and note that the explosion is way bigger than what an explosive belt would do. Besides, why would anyone blow himself up to kill the only anti-occupation group in the greenzone?

The official spokesman of a secular group that lost an MP in the explosion announced that the attack was aimed at silencing “nationalist MPs who are against splitting
iraq and against the oil law”.Looking at who was killed and injured in the attack, it seems like they were ALL nationalists. Also, considering that the parliament was just about to begin debating the oil law this week, the timing of the attack was very convenient for the bush/imf/separatists.

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How an ex-Mossad chief, a German uberspy, and a gaggle of top-dollar GOP lobbyists helped Kurdistan snag 15 tons of $100 bills.

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Intel today announced new details of its forthcoming Santa Rosa PC platform, including a significant revision of the Core 2 Duo chip.

“We call this processor Core 2 Duo but really it’s Core 2 Duo on steroids. This microprocessor is going to be more powerful than the previous generation,” said Intel’s mobility chief, Mooly Eden.

The new chips will be able to overclock one of the cores if the other core is not being used.

“The idea is the following,” explained Eden. “If you are running a single threaded application, one of the cores can go to sleep, and the left over power can be used by the other core – we give it a turbo boost; the ability to run faster than it used to.

“This is not overclocking. Overclocking is when you take a chip and increase its clock speed and run it out of spec. This is not out of spec. Here, it is within the spec of the dual-cores, we just identify when one core is not using the headroom and we give it to the other core.

“This is called Enhanced Dynamic Acceleration Technology. We’ve had problems implementing it, but we’ve been able to do it in Santa Rosa,” Eden said.

“Enhanced Dynamic Acceleration Technology” is a triumph of marketing.

Notice how the focus is on the transition where one core becomes inactive: the other one speeds up.

What really happens is that when the chip workload increases, the voltage and frequency are throttled to stay within a power envelope – the chip slows down. But since you can’t sell that, it’s marketed in reverse.

It’s the same when some campaign says “the first six months we give you a 50% discount if you sign up now!” It really pisses of the marketing droids who come up with that when you tell them “what you really mean is that you are going to double my bill in six months”.

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One of the most chilling scenes in Alex Gibney’s new documentary, “Taxi to the Dark Side” (which premiers at the Tribeca Film Festival in a fortnight) is a clip from George Bush delivering his 2003 State of the Union Address. “Some of them,” Bush said, referring to alleged terrorists “have now been captured and gotten a taste of American justice.” The hall rose in applause, Democrats and Republicans. And a little more than a year later, America got its first glimpse of how Bush understands “American justice.” It apparently has nothing to do with people being charged with crimes and convicted after a fair trial. It involves brutal punishments being meted out to people who have been captured based on a president’s decision – delegated to unknown persons in the vast national security apparatus – that they are terrorists. A decision that, as it turns out, happens to be wrong roughly 75% of the time.

This is not what I understood to be “American justice,” and calling it that is an insult to the nation’s foundational values. Perhaps we should call it “Texas justice.” I thought that after reading an article in the Chicago Tribune, commenting on yet another case in which a person who has spent half of his life in prison in connection with a rape conviction is now being exonerated due to conclusive DNA evidence – the thirteenth such case in Dallas County since 2001.

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And finally it made me think back to my own time in law school in Austin, Texas and to the words of my criminal procedure professor, George Dix. A very humane and wise man, Dix took some time to acquaint the outsiders in the class – like me – with the facts of life in Texas criminal justice, including the “plenty guilty rule” (a favorite of Texas judges, providing the notion that if a defendant was “plenty guilty,” it really didn’t matter how many procedural rights had been trampled).

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By now I’m sure you’re familiar with the age-old adage, “Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten.” When my doctor said this to me the other day, it made me think: can the statement really be true? Although the idiom implies a causal link, let’s take it at face value and assume that it is merely observing a correlation between the kitten mortality rate and the masturbation rate. Does such a correlation exist?

Approximately 70,000 dogs and cats are born in the U.S. each day, or 25,567,500 each year. Of these, roughly 54%, or 13,806,450, are cats. Since 34.5% of cats don’t live to see their first birthday, we can assume that about 4,763,225 kittens die each year in the United States alone. We’ll take for granted that God in His divine Wisdom purposely smote each of these kittens.

Let’s assume that the idiom is talking only about male masturbation. Let’s further assume, highly conservatively, that males do not start masturbating until they reach age 15. Of the total U.S. male population, 107,199,356 would then be masturbation-age males. Again, let’s conservatively estimate that teenagers masturbate no more frequently than adults, and that all men masturbate an average of 20 times each month or 240 times per year. This means that each man in the United States masturbates approximately every 1.5 days. It also means that there are approximately 25,727,845,440 male masturbation sessions in the United States each year.

There are nearly 26 billion male masturbation sessions in the U.S., yet there are fewer than five million kitten deaths annually. Far from a one-to-one correlation, there are 5401.5 masturbation sessions for every single kitten death. This means that the average American man can masturbate regularly for 22.5 years before he is responsible for the death of a single kitten. Indeed, with a life expectancy of less than 75 years, the average man will be responsible for only two or three kitten deaths in a lifetime of vigorous masturbation.

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Thousands of white-collar criminals across the country are no longer being prosecuted in federal court — and, in many cases, not at all — leaving a trail of frustrated victims and potentially billions of dollars in fraud and theft losses.

It is the untold story of the Bush administration’s massive restructuring of the FBI after the terrorism attacks of 9/11.

Five-and-a-half years later, the White House and the Justice Department have failed to replace at least 2,400 agents transferred to counterterrorism squads, leaving far fewer agents on the trail of identity thieves, con artists, hatemongers and other criminals.

Two successive attorneys general have rejected the FBI’s pleas for reinforcements behind closed doors.

While there hasn’t been a terrorism strike on American soil since the realignment, few are aware of the hidden cost: a dramatic plunge in FBI investigations and case referrals in many of the crimes that the bureau has traditionally fought, including sophisticated fraud, embezzlement schemes and civil rights violations.

“Politically, this trade-off has been accepted,” said Charles Mandigo, a former FBI congressional liaison who retired four years ago as special agent in charge in Seattle. “But do the American people know this trade-off has been made?”

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Thousands of families have been hit with fines of £100 or more for putting their rubbish out on the wrong day.

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By contrast, shoplifters have to pay on-the-spot fines of only £80 despite protests of retailers that the average store theft nets nearly £150.

Guess which fine is more profitable for local governments?

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Americans’ knowledge of national and international affairs has changed little in two decades despite the emergence of 24-hour cable news and the Internet as major news sources.

People surveyed in February were slightly less able than those polled in 1989 to name the vice president, their state’s governor and the president of Russia but slightly more able to answer other questions correctly about national politics, according to a poll released Sunday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

Of the 1,502 adults survey in February, 69 percent correctly answered Dick Cheney when asked who was the vice president, compared with 74 percent who correctly responded Dan Quayle when the same question was asked in 1989.

I’m pretty sure having news dedicated 24/7 to Don Imus, missing white woman #3256, and Anna Nicole Smith has something to do with it.

And then there’s this, of course.

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Tim Russert: “You know, we were supposed to talk about Alberto Gonzales and we were supposed to talk about the 2008 race… this was a lot more important.”

After a full week of shocking and sometimes heartbreaking news from around the world and especially in the political environment, what single issue could be so important that the Meet the Press round table discussed it (and nothing else) for 36 full minutes? Iraq? Iran? Wolfowitz? Missing emails? Deadly weather patterns?

Nope.

Don. Fucking. Imus.

Apparently the Anna Nicole Smith baby has a known father, so that was right out…

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What do you do on May 3, 2007, the “National Day of Prayer,” if you are an atheist, do not believe in prayer and are opposed to the observance of a prayer day being imposed on all American citizens?

While Believers are praying on May 3rd (an act that has been scientifically proven to be ineffective), groups of atheists will go to Blood Banks in scores of U.S. locales to donate their blood and sign up for organ donation programs. It is a nationwide action which we hope will point out that there are alternatives to silently beseeching a deity to perform miracles.

“While religious people are on their knees, we atheists will be on our feet, giving a part of ourselves for the benefit of humanity,” says Kenneth Bronstein, founder of the Center For Atheism, an informational and activist group based in New York City. “We know that prayer does not work–but medical science does.”

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Whether you are a normal searcher, someone trying to download illegal material, a terrorist looking to build a bomb, or just hunting porn, we at Patriot Search welcome you!

Our mission is to provide the best possible search engine to you while at the same time, making sure the government is informed should you search for something obscure, illegal, or unpatriotic.

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Michael Jackson is in discussions about creating a 50-foot robotic replica of himself to roam the Las Vegas desert, according to reports.

The pop legend is currently understood to be living in the city, as he considers making a comeback after 2004′s turbulent child sex case.

It has now been claimed that his plans include an elaborate show in Vegas, which would feature the giant Jacko striding around the desert, firing laser beams.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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A mysterious decimation of bee populations has German beekeepers worried, while a similar phenomenon in the United States is gradually assuming catastrophic proportions. The consequences for agriculture and the economy could be enormous.

As far back as 2005, Haefeker ended an article he contributed to the journal Der Kritischer Agrarbericht (Critical Agricultural Report) with an Albert Einstein quote: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

Mysterious events in recent months have suddenly made Einstein’s apocalyptic vision seem all the more topical. For unknown reasons, bee populations throughout Germany are disappearing — something that is so far only harming beekeepers. But the situation is different in the United States, where bees are dying in such dramatic numbers that the economic consequences could soon be dire. No one knows what is causing the bees to perish, but some experts believe that the large-scale use of genetically modified plants in the US could be a factor.

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Scientists call the mysterious phenomenon “Colony Collapse Disorder” (CCD), and it is fast turning into a national catastrophe of sorts. A number of universities and government agencies have formed a “CCD Working Group” to search for the causes of the calamity, but have so far come up empty-handed. But, like Dennis vanEngelsdorp, an apiarist with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, they are already referring to the problem as a potential “AIDS for the bee industry.”

Credit & Copyright: Peter Tuthill (Sydney U.)

What could cause a nebula to appear square? No one is quite sure. The hot star system known as MWC 922, however, appears to be imbedded in a nebula with just such a shape. The above image combines infrared exposures from the Hale Telescope on Mt. Palomar in California, and the Keck-2 Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. A leading progenitor hypothesis for the square nebula is that the central star or stars somehow expelled cones of gas during a late developmental stage. For MWC 922, these cones happen to incorporate nearly right angles and be visible from the sides. Supporting evidence for the cone hypothesis includes radial spokes in the image that might run along the cone walls. Researchers speculate that the cones viewed from another angle would appear similar to the gigantic rings of supernova 1987A, possibly indicating that a star in MWC 922 might one day itself explode in a similar supernova.

If you thought it was safe again to buy Sony products, you were wrong!

And people who still buy Sony crap go “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”