[Quote:]

War crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be punished and it will be no defense to say, “I was just following orders.”

-G.W. Bush

[Quote:]

As secret missions go, this one was a flop.

On Monday morning, one of the 747s used to ferry around the U.S. president was dispatched to the Statue of Liberty, escorted by a fighter jet. Assignment: Get some fresh glamour shots of the plane.

The Air Force said the flight needed to remain confidential. So while New York police knew about it, as did at least one person in the mayor’s office, regular New Yorkers remained in the dark.

As a result, to onlookers Monday all across downtown Manhattan — where the World Trade Center once stood — the photo shoot looked like a terrorist attack. People watched in horror as a massive aircraft, trailed closely by an F-16 fighter jet, banked and roared low near the city, in a frightening echo of the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

Fearing the worst, thousands of people streamed out of the skyscrapers and into the streets. Some buildings ordered evacuations. “Oh God, it was mayhem in here, just mayhem,” says Rubin Shimon, manager of Styling Haircutters, a barbershop near Ground Zero. Many people took shelter in the shop to call loved ones on their cellphones.

There used to be a time when New Yorkers simply extended their middle fingers and yelled, “Hey, I’m walkin’ here!”

The terrorists have won.

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It has been just over a month since the last time the Sri Lankan conflict was featured here. In that time, government forces have put further pressure on the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and hundreds of thousands of civilians in the north of the country have been trapped in a war zone. Press coverage is still very limited, and conflicting stories are the norm, with LTTE representatives claiming the ethnic Tamil civilians are staying willingly, fearful of government forces, and the Sri Lankan government claiming the civilians are being held against their will by the LTTE. According to the UN, over 6,500 civilians have been killed, thousands more injured, and a stream of over 100,000 refugees has recently left the LTTE stronghold, and the Sri Lankan government has halted the use of heavy-caliber weaponry. (31 photos total)

This undated picture released on April 25, 2009 by pro-LTTE website Tamilnet shows civilians taking cover after what they say is an explosion caused by a goverment airstrike in the no-fire zone in Mullaitivu district. UN humanitarian chief John Holmes was to hold talks with the Sri Lankan government over the thousands of civilians caught in fighting between troops and Tamil rebels, officials said.The Sri Lankan government has resisted all calls to halt an offensive that is now on the brink of wiping out the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels, who have been fighting for an independent Tamil homeland since 1972. (AFP/Getty Images)

[Quote:]

You know the American public discourse on Somali piracy has bottomed out when the animated show South Park features the most balanced treatment of piracy on TV. While supposedly legitimate pundits call for land invasions and summary executions to wipe out seaborne “terrorists,” in last Wednesday’s episode South Park called piracy for what it is: the result of two decades of humanitarian disaster.

[Quote:]

Back during the debate for HR 1, I was amazed at how easily conservatives were willing to accept and repeat lies about spending in the stimulus package, even after those provisions had been debunked as fabrications. The $30 million for the salt marsh mouse is a perfect example, and Kagro X documented well over a dozen congressmen repeating the lie.

To test the limits of this phenomenon, I started a parody Twitter account last Thursday, which I called “InTheStimulus”, where all the tweets took the format “InTheStimulus is $x million for ______”. I went through the followers of Republican Twitter feeds and in turn followed them, all the way up to the limit of 2000. From people following me back, I was able to get 500 followers in less than a day, and 1000 by Sunday morning.

You can read through all the retweets and responses by looking at the Twitter search for “InTheStimulus”. For the most part, my first couple days of posts were believable, but unsourced lies:

* $3 million for replacement tires for 1992-1995 Geo Metros.
* $750,000 for an underground tunnel connecting a middle school and high school in North Carolina.
* $4.7 million for a program supplying public television to K-8 classrooms.
* $2.3 million for a museum dedicated to the electric bass guitar.

The responses, as you might imagine, were overwhelmingly positive.

[Quote:]

All of 12 men arrested over a suspected bomb plot in the UK have now been released without charge by police.

Eleven of the men have been transferred to the custody of the UK Borders Agency and now face possible deportation.

Of course they will be deported – that way they won’t be able to embarrass the police… for example by giving interviews to the press…

[Quote:]

Photographs of bankers who left Iceland after the financial crisis have a new use in the restroom of a bar in Reykjavik, the capital.

[Quote:]

1. If you’re standing on the Moon holding a pen, and you let go, will it
a) float away,
b) float where it is,
or c) fall to the ground?

[Quote:]

On July 15, 2007, The New York Times published an article with the headline “The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age.” The most prominently featured of the “new titans” was Sanford Weill, the former chairman of Citigroup, who insisted that he and his peers in the financial sector had earned their immense wealth through their contributions to society.

Soon after that article was printed, the financial edifice Mr. Weill took credit for helping to build collapsed, inflicting immense collateral damage in the process. Even if we manage to avoid a repeat of the Great Depression, the world economy will take years to recover from this crisis.

All of which explains why we should be disturbed by an article in Sunday’s Times reporting that pay at investment banks, after dipping last year, is soaring again — right back up to 2007 levels.

[..]

So what’s going on here? Why are paychecks heading for the stratosphere again? Claims that firms have to pay these salaries to retain their best people aren’t plausible: with employment in the financial sector plunging, where are those people going to go?

No, the real reason financial firms are paying big again is simply because they can. They’re making money again (although not as much as they claim), and why not? After all, they can borrow cheaply, thanks to all those federal guarantees, and lend at much higher rates. So it’s eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may be regulated.

[Quote:]

When House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who has long championed investment in pandemic preparation, included roughly $900 million for that purpose in this year’s emergency stimulus bill, he was ridiculed by conservative operatives and congressional Republicans.

Enjoy your swine-flu, folks!

Oh, and for some excellent pig-flu based hate-mongering, check this

[Quote:]

[Quote:]

I wonder – did they manage to stop piracy, or is it still going on today?

[Quote:]

The use of torture by the US has proved so counter-productive that it may have led to the death of as many US soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11, says the leader of a crack US interrogation team in Iraq.

“The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa’ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology,” says Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq. It was the team led by Major Alexander [a named assumed for security reasons] that obtained the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa’ida in Iraq. Zarqawi was then killed by bombs dropped by two US aircraft on the farm where he was hiding outside Baghdad on 7 June 2006. Major Alexander said that he learnt where Zarqawi was during a six-hour interrogation of a prisoner with whom he established relations of trust.

Major Alexander’s attitude to torture by the US is a combination of moral outrage and professional contempt. “It plays into the hands of al-Qa’ida in Iraq because it shows us up as hypocrites when we talk about human rights,” he says. An eloquent and highly intelligent man with experience as a criminal investigator within the US military, he says that torture is ineffective, as well as counter-productive. “People will only tell you the minimum to make the pain stop,” he says. “They might tell you the location of a house used by insurgents but not that it is booby-trapped.”

In his compelling book How to Break a Terrorist, Major Alexander explains that prisoners subjected to abuse usually clam up, say nothing, or provide misleading information. In an interview he was particularly dismissive of the “ticking bomb” argument often used in the justification of torture. This supposes that there is a bomb timed to explode on a bus or in the street which will kill many civilians. The authorities hold a prisoner who knows where the bomb is. Should they not torture him to find out in time where the bomb is before it explodes?

Major Alexander says he faced the “ticking time bomb” every day in Iraq because “we held people who knew about future suicide bombings”. Leaving aside the moral arguments, he says torture simply does not work. “It hardens their resolve. They shut up.” He points out that the FBI uses normal methods of interrogation to build up trust even when they are investigating a kidnapping and time is of the essence. He would do the same, he says, “even if my mother was on a bus” with a hypothetical ticking bomb on board. It is quite untrue to imagine that torture is the fastest way of obtaining information, he says.

[Quote:]

Pop quiz: Which European country has the most liberal drug laws? (Hint: It’s not the Netherlands.)

[..]

The question is, does the new policy work? At the time, critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to “drug tourists” and exacerbate Portugal’s drug problem; the country had some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. But the recently released results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggest otherwise.

The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

“Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success,” says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. “It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.”

Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal’s drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.

[Quote:]

Senior bankers and board members at Deutsche Bank are considering their positions after heated rows over the decision not to pay bonuses at the group.

Deutsche Bank, which is expected to unveil first quarter profits this week of around €800m (£720m), is facing a revolt by angry managers furious at the decision of the chief executive, Josef Ackermann, to not take his bonus. Senior staff felt compelled to follow suit.

A source close to the bank said: “Ackermann came out and said he wasn’t going to take a bonus last year and forced the hand of the board and others. They simply had no choice but to forgo their bonuses. But bankers live for their bonuses and are furious at the handling of all this.”

[Quote:]

After years of pissing and moaning, the spelling Nazis have won.
As reported by the far flung China Daily, 3news New Zealand, England’s Mail Online, NPR, and numerous web sites, the town of Webster Massachusetts will finally correct the spelling on two signs for the local lake.

For years many people, myself included, thought it meant, “I fish on my side, you fish on your side, and nobody fishes in the middle”.
But now that the correct spelling has been brought forward, it clearly means, “The fishing place at the boundaries, the neutral meeting ground”.

I’m glad that’s been cleared up.

[Quote:]

Rasmussen Reports published a poll recently which showed that 20% of respondants believe socialism is better than capitalism. Among those under 30, the percentage goes up to 33%. And apparently, some Republicans believe that percentage is actually much higher, as the Republican National Committee has called upon RNC chairman Mike Steele to start calling Democrats “Democrat Socialists”. Steele, for his part, told Fox News, “We don’t see this president so much as a socialist as we see him as a collectivist“.

[..]

Prediction: Republicans calling Democrats “socialists” and labelling their policies “socialist” will increase support for “socialism”, because a lot of people like those policies and will start thinking “hey, this socialism shit sounds pretty good.”

[Quote:]

Col. Steven Kleinman, interrogation specialist, was interviewed yesterday on NPR about the use of torture in Iraq:

NPR: And these harsh interrogation methods had been used by the Soviets and the Chinese to get people to say things that weren’t true?

Kleinman:That’s true. And it’s not just harsh physically, but I think the element that was more persuasive was their ability to induce what is known as debility, depression and dread through emotional and psychological techniques that profoundly altered somebody’s ability to answer questions truthfully even if they wanted to. It truly undermined their ability to recall, so therefore it would call into question its efficacy in an intelligence-based interrogation. [link] .

Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind claims that the torture was not intended to gather intelligence, but to create it:

The White House simply wouldn‘t take no for an answer and it went with another method. Torture was the method. “Get me a confession, I don‘t care how you do it.” And that bled all the way through the government, both on the CIA side and the Army side. It‘s extraordinary.[link]
(via Hullabaloo)

Interestingly, research into methods used by North Korea against U.S. soldiers omit discussing torture, because it wasn’t necessary:

I have not included physical torture as a general category in this outline, despite the fact that many of our prisoners of war did encounter physical torture and despite the fact that a few of the specific measures in the outline may involve physical pain. I have omitted torture from the outline to emphasize that inflicting physical pain is not a necessary nor particularly effective method of inducing compliance. (1957) [link]

[Quote:]

[Usability Frustration Test #4: Should plugging the power in require ½ hour, four people and a call to the help desk?]

Google Cache copy

[Quote:]

 // At this point, I'd like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format.
 // PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an
 // insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having
 // worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire
 // that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.
 // If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different
 // places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those
 // too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide
 // that *these* particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement
 // should *not* be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned,
 // or aligned with the alignment included in the size. Here, though, it is not included.
 // Either one of these three behaviours would be fine. A sane format would pick one. PSD,
 // of course, uses all three, and more.
 // Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of
 // your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th
 // birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but
 // at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people
 // responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format.
 // Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this,
 // I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending
 // me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or
 // other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so
 // difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination. I
 // was naturally not gullible enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done
 // so, I would have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire.
 // Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch
 // them on a spaceship directly into the sun.
 //
 // PSD is not my favourite file format.

[Quote:]

Ireland is scrapping the ill-starred evoting scheme on which it has already lavished upwards of €51m without a single vote being cast, the government announced today.

The Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, John Gormley said in a statement that “a process will now be put in place, including discussions with the supplier, to address the disposal of the electronic voting and counting equipment and termination of storage arrangements.” Apparently just storing the system costs the country millions of euros.

[..]

Today, however, Gormley admitted that retrofitting the machines to provide an audit trail would cost the government another €21m.

He noted that “the public in broad terms appear to be satisfied with the present paper-based system and we must recognise this in deciding on the future steps to be taken with the electronic voting system.”

The minister also acknowledged that “the assurance of public confidence in the democratic system is of paramount importance and it is vital to bring clarity to the present situation”.

The present situation of course, is that the Irish economy is in collapse. The country is in its first recession since the 1980s, the government has published an austerity budget and the churches are filling up for the first time in years, because they’re the only thing that’s free.

Stupid old pencils suddenly seem like a good idea, though the politicians might not want to think too hard about what the public would like to do with them right now.

[Quote:]

Hit hard by the recession, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) reported the first year-over-year revenue drop in its history Thursday—and posted revenue short of analysts’ expectations.

The company posted net income of $2.98 billion (33 cents per share), down 32 percent from the $4.4 billion (47 cents per share) recorded during the same period a year ago. However, that included a 6 cents per share one-time charge due to severance payments and investment impairments. Revenue for the company’s third fiscal quarter dropped 6 percent to $13.65 billion, from $14.45 billion a year ago.

On average, analysts had expected earnings per share of 39 cents and revenue of $14.1 billion.

If you’re wondering why it’s relatively quiet on the weblog the last few days, here is another sneak preview of where all my time is going…

[Quote:]

The judge in The Pirate Bay trial has been accused of bias, after Sweden’s national radio station revealed that Thomas Norström was a member of the same pro-copyright groups as several of the main entertainment industry reps in the case.

Sveriges Radio’s P3 news programme claimed Norström is signed up to the Swedish Copyright Association (Svenska föreningen för upphovsrätt), which also counts Henrik Pontén, Peter Danowsky and Monique Wadsted as members. All three represented the entertainment industry in the case against BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay.

[Quote:]

Apple® today announced financial results for its fiscal 2009 second quarter ended March 28, 2009. The Company posted revenue of $8.16 billion and a net quarterly profit of $1.21 billion, or $1.33 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $7.51 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.05 billion, or $1.16 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 36.4 percent, up from 32.9 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 46 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

[Quote:]

Any recording business executive celebrating the court victory over The Pirate Bay should have been in San Francisco this weekend for a reality check. Attending CodeCon 2009 would have brought them swiftly down to earth, and emphasised the futility of trying to prevent P2P file sharing. What’s the point, when you can make money off it instead?

Legal “victories” become ever more expensive – and Pyrrhic. I didn’t hear a word of anti-copyright rhetoric from the hardcore coders here unlike the poseurs at Pirate Bay. Instead, there were demonstrations of working code designed to enhance the security of users. The fact that this ingenuity was designed to obscure music lovers from snoopers is a consequence of how the incentives are lined up today. If P2P was legal – in controlled, licensed situations – these coders would be coding great music services.

(If you think Pirate Bay or Rapidshare is as good as music services can get, you are suffering from a severely crippled imagination).

Various projects suggested that detecting copyright infringers may soon become a whole lot harder.