[Samuel Alito, January 11, 2006:]

When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account. When I have a case involving someone who’s been subjected to discrimination because of disability, I have to think of people who I’ve known and admire very greatly who’ve had disabilities, and I’ve watched them struggle to overcome the barriers that society puts up often just because it doesn’t think of what it’s doing — the barriers that it puts up to them.

[Sen. Jeff Sessions (R), in his opening statement on the confirmation hearing on Monday for Judge Sonia Sotomayor:]

I will not vote for — no senator should vote for — an individual nominated by any President who believes it is acceptable for a judge to allow their own personal background, gender, prejudices, or sympathies to sway their decision in favor of, or against, parties before the court.

In my view, such a philosophy is disqualifying.

Guess which hypocrite voted, twice, to confirm Alito?

[Quote:]

The G8 didn’t explain what it meant by “developed countries”, but I’ll assume it was referring to the nations listed in Annex 1 of the Kyoto protocol: those that have promised to limit their greenhouse gases by 2012. (If it meant the OECD nations, the results are very similar.) To keep this simple and consistent, I’ll consider just the carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels, as listed by US Energy Information Administration. It doesn’t publish figures for Monaco and Lichtenstein, but we can forgive that. The 38 remaining Annex 1 countries produce 15bn tonnes of CO2, or 51% of global emissions. Were they to do as the UK proposes, cutting this total by 80% and offsetting half of it, they would have to buy reductions equal to 20% of the world’s total carbon production. This means that other countries would need to cut 42% of their emissions just to absorb our carbon offsets.

But the G8 has also adopted another of the UK’s targets: a global cut of 50% by 2050. Fifty per cent of world production is 14.6bn tonnes. If the Annex 1 countries reduce their emissions by 80% (including offsets), they will trim global output by 12bn tonnes. The other countries must therefore find further cuts of 2.6bn tonnes. Added to the offsets they’ve sold, this means that their total obligation is 8.6bn tonnes, or 60% of their current emissions.

So here’s the outcome. The rich nations, if they follow the UK’s presumed lead, will cut their carbon pollution by 40%. The poorer nations will cut their carbon pollution by 60%.

[Quote:]

Remember all of this — the $700 billion bank bailout, the AIG scandal, dark and scary threats of imminent global meltdown if there wasn’t full-scale capitulation by the citizenry to the immense transfer of public wealth to the private investment banking sector? Such distant, hazy memories: so many exciting celebrity deaths and riveting celebrity resignations ago. If sequences of events like these don’t cause mass citizen outrage, then it’s hard to imagine what will

Go read the entire thing…

[Quote:]

Knowledge of the Bible is in decline in Britain, with fewer than one in 20 people able to name all Ten Commandments and youngsters viewing the Christian holy book as “old-fashioned”, a survey said.

Time for a rewrite, I guess.

1. no1 b4 me. srsly.

2. dnt wrshp pix/idols

3. no omg’s

4. no wrk on w/end (sat 4 now; sun l8r)

5. pos ok – ur m&d r cool

6. dnt kill ppl

7. :-X only w/ m8

8. dnt steal

9. dnt lie re: bf

10. dnt ogle ur bf’s m8. or ox. or dnkey. myob.

M, pls rite on tabs & giv 2 ppl.
ttyl, JHWH.

[Quote:]

Buchanan: Well, first, with regard to Levi, I think First Dude up there in Alaska, Todd Palin, ought to take Levi down to the creek and hold his head underwater until the thrashing stops.

If you guessed that the CIA plan that was too secret to tell Congress involved assassination teams, you can collect your prize now.

World record for being unaware of the Streisand Effect goes to Guinness

The higher the buildings, the lower the morals.

Noel Coward (1899 – 1973)

[Quote:]

A group of European publishers has recently released a declaration of principles, the “Hamburg Declaration,” that amounts to a long-winded rant against the Internet for stealing their news. They want the government to step in and fix the situation by force of law.

Most of the statements in the relatively short declaration, which will surely take its place among thousands of other European declarations on intellectual property and other matters that have come out over the past few years, hinge on the idea that “universal access to news” does not equal “free.” In this respect, the publishers want to maintain the democratic ideal of a “fourth estate” that provides news to an informed citizenry, while simultaneously restricting access to that news to those who can pay for it directly.

What sets this declaration apart from the other Hamburg declarations out there, or from the various Geneva declarations or Berlin declarations, is that this one is intended to give the publishers’ favorite solution to the news-stealing problem, the Automated Content Access Protocol, the force of law.

ACAP is a metadata standard that’s a bit like robots.txt—but on illegal steroids that cause anger management issues and can precipitate bouts of violence and heart problems. The standard aims to dictate how search engines and other aggregators handle a publisher’s content by defining usage rights that third parties are supposed to respect. But because search engines have rejected ACAP in favor of their own news metadata solutions, the publishers are asking the EU to step in and mandate it outright

So… should nobody have reported on their declaration? After all, the declaration was the originating news source and nobody else should have access.

[Quote:]

France’s controversial “three-strikes” internet law is getting another do-over. Originally rejected by the country’s National Assembly, revised then declared unconstitutional, the anti-file sharer bill has yet again been revamped and passed for consideration by the French constitutional court.

The new version of the bill, like its predecessors, is intended to temporarily disconnect individuals from the internet if they are accused of online copyright infringement three times.

I think this is the third time they try this. Do the politicians get disconnected if this law fails again?

[Quote:]

Anyone who has ever had cats knows how difficult it can be to get them to do anything they don’t already want to do. But it seems that the house cats themselves have had distinctly less trouble getting humans to do their bidding, according to a report published in the July 14th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

The rather crafty felines motivate people to fill their food dishes by sending something of a mixed signal: an urgent cry or meowing sound embedded within an otherwise pleasant purr. The result is a call that humans generally find annoyingly difficult to ignore.

“The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response,” said Karen McComb of the University of Sussex. “Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom.” She suggests that this form of cat communication sends a subliminal sort of message, tapping into an inherent sensitivity that humans and other mammals have to cues relevant in the context of nurturing their offspring.

Judah has this down to an art as well…