Bring your neighborhood into unnerving context...

Well, this is creepy - check out a map of all recently-reported crimes in your (or any) neighborhood at CrimeReports.com. You can sort by the distance from your home, type of crime and how recent it was reported. Bonus creepy points for using the site to view the addresses and photos of registered sex offenders in your area. Eerie!

link

"I want everybody to remember WHY THEY NEED US!"

(No, my frame of reference for tyrants does not end at this movie, but the visual appeal is undeniable.)

So yes, now it's pretty much official that the Bush Administration pressured Tom Ridge to raise the terror alert for Bush's reelection. If the potential for this sort of thing to happen (and the fact that it did happen) isn't Exhibit A in the case for the uselessness of this manipulative system, nothing oughta change your mind. Bush already capitalized on American fear of the foreigner and perceived weakness to bust pretty much anybody he wanted to connect with trrrism, but there's never been clearer evidence that manipulation was so conspicuously hard-coded into his policies.

No matter how angry we get at Obama for trying to insure the uninsured, remember this.

Big

This has already been big on Digg for some time, but I feel obligated to post it here. It's very humbling to read and reminiscent of a certain XKCD strip which earns kudos for being drawn.

The Utter Bigly Hugosity of Space (This gets the "frightening" tag because I'm not creating a "sobering" one)

"Fuhrer's Law": The Bush Memos and Treason

A provocative article deserves a
provocative image, dontchathink?

What a doozy today. In perhaps one of the most significant stories of our lifetime (their words and mine), new details have come to light about the memos written by John Yoo while serving as a legal advisor to President Bush and the Executive Branch. Alternet's Naomi Wolf puts it most simply (and alarmingly):

In early March, more shocking details emerged about George W. Bush legal counsel John Yoo's memos outlining the destruction of the republic.

The memos lay the legal groundwork for the president to send the military to wage war against U.S. citizens; take them from their homes to Navy brigs without trial and keep them forever; close down the First Amendment; and invade whatever country he chooses without regard to any treaty or objection by Congress.

...

The memos are a confession. The memos could not be clearer: This was the legal groundwork of an attempted coup. I expected massive front page headlines from the revelation that these memos exited. Almost nothing. I was shocked.

John Yoo (a man who, incidentally, is eligible for war crimes trial) was instrumental in helping to consolidate presidential power and rationalize some of the most extreme breaches of justice and U.S. law perpetrated by the Bush administration over the last eight years, among them the justification of torture and limitation of habeus corpus, presidential power to override the fourth amendment through domestic surveillance, and worse. Constitutional scholar Michael Ratner explains:

What Yoo says is that the president's authority as commander in chief in the so-called war on terror is not bound by any law passed by Congress, any treaty, or the protections of free speech, due process and the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. The First, Fourth and Fifth amendments -- gone.

What this actually means is that the president can order the military to operate in the U.S. and to operate without constitutional restrictions. They -- the military -- can pick you or me up in the U.S. for any reason and without any legal process. They would not have any restrictions on entering your house to search it, or to seize you. They can put you into a brig without any due process or going to court. (That's the Fourth and Fifth amendments.)

The military can disregard the Posse Comitatus law, which restricts the military from acting as police in the the United States. And the president can, in the name of wartime restrictions, limit free speech. There it is in black and white: we are looking at one-person rule without any checks and balances -- a lawless state. Law by fiat.

I won't dignify the allegations of treason made later, mainly because I don't have to - they stand completely by themselves. What was done here was treason, pure and simple - a lawless, irresponsible administration laying the groundwork for the systematic elimination of checks and balances in America. Though the Department of Justice later rejected Yoo's assertions that Congress had no check or balance against the president, history has shown that President Bush proceeded in these areas as if Yoo's memos were valid legal counsel. Ratner puts it best:

"This would be the president making war against the institutions of the United States."

Further Readin':

The memos and summaries on Wikipedia
Salon's Gary Kumiya on the torture memos
Mark Mazzetti, New York Times on interrogations

Some of the most disturbing animals on Earth

Atom.com has a great collection of some of the most disturbing animal on Earth. These animal aren't just scary-looking, but psychologically disturbing. My dad often quotes the Jethro Tull line "He who made kittens put snakes in the grass." Sometimes I think it's more like "He who made kittens also made the vampire squid", seen above. The story says that this thing has predators - I'd hate to meet them in a dark underwater alley.

This is a link to Part 3 - if the others are as compellingly terrifying we might have a series on our hands.

EDIT: Oh, and be warned. We're talking eyeball worms and giant spiders here. And oh no oh no the squeamish might not want to check out Parts 1 and 2. There are animals in there that are actually evil.

Related links:

Heteropoda Maxima: The Spider From Hell (You'll see the same image in the article)

Further evidence that the internet is an insensitive twit. . .

A Google Image Search for "coulrophobia", a fear of clowns:


You'll need to click the image to enlarge it, should you be so inclined.

Related links:

Heteropoda Maxima: The Spider From Hell
An "Exorcist"-like doll commercial

Heteropoda Maxima: The Spider From Hell

It's not the creepiest spider in the world, but this image of a Heteropoda Maxima and its brood is one of the creepiest collections of pixels I've ever seen. I wish I had an attribution, but I can't find this outside of some random German webforum.

UPDATE: I posted this image on the xkcd forums, whose residents have been kind enough to post related images of predatory centipedes, bird-eating spiders and blankets of baby spiders. Lovers of creepy crawlies should check it out (don't worry - most of the images are in spoiler tags so you won't be confronted with them all at once.

"Location aware" doesn't sound that scary, now does it?

Webmonkey reports:

"Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 7 plans to offer developers location tools [tools that know your geographical location] at the operating system level and the company doesn’t seem to think users care about control or privacy.

Before you freak out at the thought that Redmond will soon be tracking your every move, keep in mind that the new features will be disabled by default. That’s the good news."

Sure, allowing one of the most bloated, patronizing corporations in history to know exactly where you are sounds like a bad thing, but. . . actually, I'm not sure how to finish that sentence.

Feds Refuse to Identify Over $2 Trillion in Illegal Loans

Anybody who thought the $700,000,000,000 bailout was the end of massive misguided government handouts to failed businesses under the cloak of helping our economy should prepare to be disappointed - according to Bloomberg, the Feds have squirreled away nearly $2,000,000,000,000 of our tax dollars and, as usual, don't feel any particular need to share the specifics with us. (And don't worry - Barney Frank plainly doesn't feel penitent for his hand in this.)

Here's a mere $315 billion for reference (from here):

The miniscule dot near the corner of the stack is a person. The larger shape is a car. This stack is 450 feet tall (38 stories) and 25,000 square feet in area. To turn it into 2 trillion dollars, either imagine 6.4 stacks just like this, or enough dollar bills to wrap around the Earth's equator 5.1 times. That's how much your government is taking (actually, let's just call it "stealing").

Alternatively, you could use $20 bills and merely imagine a football field buried in sixty-three feet of cash, or 300 dollars for every single person living on this Earth. That's not quite as bad, right?

The stack depicted in the image represents only the cash spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, money the president is legally authorized to approve (I won't get into the ethics of this spending today). This $2 trillion, on the other hand (let's write it out again: $2,000,000,000,000) is not only unethical and shortsighted, but completely unconstitutional.

And does anybody really think that this type of thing will stop under any administration?

Wasn't the doll sitting by the window last night?

Eric Snider links to what is possibly the scariest television commercial of all time. It's not the baby doll that gets me (certainly the Elmo dolls are no less creepy), but the slasher movie editing and deranged announcer. This commercial debuted in a time long before children's laughter and reanimated dolls were standard horror fare, so it's possible that they wouldn't be as terrified of this video as EVERY SINGLE MODERN PERSON would, but I still like to think there was some element of evil in this commercial's production.

How We're Destroying Ourselves: A Post of Humor and Mirth

For all that I want to call him a jackass, he actually looks sort of cool.

My college paper ran a cover story three days ago, on the seventh anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks and subsequent destruction, titled "We Will Never Forget." I realized the intended heartwarming nature of the message, but I found it disheartening. (And it's not just the fact that it's a lazy and shiftless excuse for a cover story, a fact we won't even get into here.)

9/11 was a tragedy, yes, as is any incident of human barbarism toward others (not to mention the 3,000 some-odd deaths incurred by the 19 hijackers). But much of the tragedy of 9/11 stems from what we did afterward rather than from the attacks themselves.

After all, deaths aren't the sole measure of tragedy. In the year 2001 in the United States 16,242 died from emphysema, 42,443 from automobile accidents and 157,400 from lung cancer alone (that last number was built from projections but the specific count isn't important).

And to judge from the reactions of our leaders, economic destruction doesn't dictate whether something is tragedy. Nor is destruction of U.S. land and property a shame as long as it doesn't happen in a major economic center.

And the bills that we've signed into law over the last few years have proven that man's inhumanity to man isn't such a big deal, as long as we're being barbaric to the right people. Nor is abduction without charges or due process something to cry over. And the terrorists' "assault on our freedoms?" It's nothing compared to what we're already doing to ourselves (link1) (link2) (link3). And let's not worry about the right of an honest American to feel secure in their daily actions, ok?

The Trade Center attacks have given us license to grant the already powerful among us more power, destroy our checks and balances, hate those who are different from us who we won't even bother to try to understand, bash two countries to the ground, continue to occupy them with soldiers and private firms (and are we doing anything but teaching Iraqis that the big and powerful will always run things?), detain more people without warrants, tread on the Bill of Rights and otherwise muck up our own nation.

This started out as a funny sort of satirical post. I was going to propose that we adopt a new scale of measurement for foreign disasters and deaths, one that measures them in American lives so that we could feel honest in acting the way we do regarding foreign tragedy and domestic tragedy that doesn't involve Muslims. For example, twenty times as many people died in the Sichuan earthquake of China four months ago than on 9/11/01. Seventy-six times as many died in the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake and subsequent tsunami than 9/11. The idea was that we could muster up an actual equation to figure out just how much we should care about such destruction. Factoring in proximity, ethnicity, government type of affected country and damage to U.S. interests, for example, we might estimate that the Indonesian tsunami cost the world the equivalent of about 300 American lives. That's American Life Units, or A.L.U.'s for short. If we decided that the Sichuan earthquake only cost the world about 30 A.L.U.'s, for example, we could consider ourselves intellectually honest for still urging people to remember the 3,000 A.L.U.'s lost in the attacks of 9/11 seven years ago.

All of a sudden I decided it wasn't funny anymore. Can you tell why? Look - all of you who think that American lives and interests are more important than anybody else's had better think about what's happened in our country as a result of 9/11. And that's something we'd better not forget.

EDIT: Again, it's not the fact that atrocities have happened in Iraq (isolated individuals will sometimes do terrible things when you give them a gun), but the absolute lack of responsibility being taken in response which causes more of these things to happen. Excuses, lies and trigger-happy mercenaries don't spread freedom.

I've Just Realized Something Potentially Heart Attack-Inducing in Its Significance and Shock Value, Not Including the Effect on Celebrity Magazines

What the title says - I've just realized something, potentially something big. This is quite a doozy, so you'd better sit down. Granted, the fact that you're at a computer all but guarantees that you're sitting down, but this is such a revelation that I can't afford to take that chance. Now sit comfortably, for I have a story for you, a story of deception and dark deeds. You may stop reading if you feel old chest pains flaring up, for make no mistake: this tale is not for the faint among you. Here we go:


In the late 50s, a young Michael Landon's career is beginning to take off. After a period of only minor roles, Landon gains several starring roles over the succeeding decade and a half, most notably in a popular Western (Bonanza), and as punch-happy Pa in Little House on the Prairie, where his knuckles ran red with blood and dried rashes as a result of the strict regimen of fistfights and cowardly surprise punch attacks required by his role. Finally, all of this leads to a starring role on TV's Highway to Heaven, a show teeming with religious underpinnings and allegory.


All of these heady topics - religion, U.S. history and the role of law in our society as depicted by Westerns - naturally lead Mike to more than a bit of self-examination and thought. In the late 80s to early 90s, Landon becomes dissatisfied with his acting career and begins to ponder a career in politics, then finds his interests shifting to a possible role as a political commentator. But Landon comes to a sobering realization: a show headed by a well-known actor might become popular, but would never be taken seriously! For this reason Landon adopts a new persona; beginning in the late 80s he begins hosting a small political talk show on several local stations under the purported Irish name "Shawn Hannoughty". Over a few months he then gradually reworks the spelling to "Sean Hannity", partly because the new spelling mimics actual Irish spellings, and partly because "Sean Hannity" is an anagram of "Inane Shanty", which seems to fit the babbling, bulletheaded second-generation immigrant Irishman act he has planned as a mechanism to hide his identity.

At first the dual identity is simple to maintain - Landon maintains his acting career, wears a wig on Johnny Carson in order to mimic his old hairstyle, and tries to appear levelheaded and well-adjusted when appearing in public as mild-mannered Michael Landon, lest he give away his secret identity. But, try as he might, similarities between Landon and the newly-born "Hannity" begin to arise. Why do they both have that "staring into the sun" look? Why the uniformly conservative dress and similar outfits? On certain rare occasions, Landon even slips into his nasally "Hannity" voice when out in public. So, out of love for his new career and new hobby, Landon makes a difficult decision.

On July 1, 1991, just as "Sean Hannity" begins to find an audience, Michael Landon conveniently "dies" of cancer. Landon, now a mere puppet of this "Sean" construct, lives on only in body. After years of resorting to contorted, tight facial expressions to hide his retirement-age wrinkles, and a style of debate honed from the mess of modern political discourse, Landon's transformation is essentially complete. To say that Michael Landon and "Sean Hannity" are the same person is not strictly correct - for all intents and purposes, Michael Landon is dead. Only the creation - "Sean" - lives on. See for yourself, and weep:

The New Rules of the New Aristocrats

It's getting harder and harder for me not to link to BoingBoing, whose near-daily updates on the ongoing corporate war against the rights of ordinary consumers stir up my righteous indignation, making clear the threat against free expression soon to be facing our society as corporate interests begin to dictate the law. This war isn't isolated to a particular country - it's worldwide and it's happening now.

Two consecutive posts prove particularly relevant: first, an update on Michael Geist's writings on the Canadian Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and how its institution would affect Canadians (follow the story's link for the full rundown on how the DMCA criminalizes legal uses of consumer-purchased goods by making it illegal to circumvent copy-protection and adding special provisions to fair use, essentially invalidating it) .

Just as sickening are the new rules from the Associated Press restricting legal quotations of their own articles, in direct contradiction to U.S. law. Those willing to pay for already-legal consumer uses of AP stories may buy overpriced "quotation licenses" designed to limit AP story access, licenses terminable by the AP at will.

The following quote from Patrick Nielsen Hayden, printed in the article, is so important that I'm reprinting it here:

The New York Times, an AP member organization, refers to this as an “attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt.” I suggest it’s better described as yet another attempt by a big media company to replace the established legal and social order with a system of private law (the very definition of the word “privilege”) in which a few private organizations get to dictate to the rest of society what the rules will be. See also Virgin Media claiming the right to dictate to private citizens in Britain how they’re allowed to configure their home routers, or the new copyright bill being introduced in Canada, under which the international entertainment industry, rather than democratically-accountable representatives of the Canadian people, will get to define what does and doesn’t amount to proscribed “circumvention.” Hey, why have laws? Let’s just ask established businesses what kinds of behaviors they find inconvenient, and then send the police around to shut those behaviors down. Imagine the effort we’ll save.

Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.

Welcome to a world in which you won’t own any of your technology or your music or your books, because ensuring that someone makes their profit margins will justify depriving you of the even the most basic, commonsensical rights in your personal, hand-level household goods.

The people pushing for this stuff are not well-meaning, and they are not interested in making life better for artists, writers, or any other kind of individual creators. They are would-be aristocrats who fully intend to return us to a society of orders and classes, and they’re using so-called “intellectual property” law as a tool with which to do it. Whether or not you have ever personally taped a TV show or written a blog post, if you think you’re going to wind up on top in the sort of world these people are working to build, you are out of your mind.

This inevitable aristocratization of America is a direct result of inaction on the behalf of every political party in the world, every elected representative and every corporate fat cat who allows these liberty-destroying laws and loopholes through the legal floodgate of modern legislation. The mainstream media is not reporting it because they are part of it, and most people don't even know that it's happening.

Goodbye, democracy. Tomorrow is the dawn of The Corporation.

Unreported Under-the-Table Copyright Meetings

Did you know that militant copyrightists are currently drafting a secret worldwide agreement designed to further crush free communication and eliminate P2P and enforce copy-protection on electronics companies? The new Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement reeks of the smoke-filled rooms in which it was drafted by a host of powerful politicians and Hollywood execs, and none of the major news outlets are reporting it. Not a word.

This new law would allow border officials to search mp3 players and cell phones for copyrighted content, force Internet Service Providers to release consumer information and impose this Orwellian agreement upon developing countries. Does this sound like a threat to democracy, free expression, civil liberties and freedom? NBC doesn't think so. Neither do the flag-wavers at Fox News. Good luck finding anything about the ACTA on CNN.

It's telling that only the blogs are reporting this dystopian expansion of the ball pit of lies, self-righteous elitism and corporate interest that is modern copyright legislation. The blogging revolution came just in time, providing transparency in an age in which powerful forces want to turn us into Winston Smith and Guy Montag all at once - fat, happy and consuming the crap that they feed us. Follow this - it's going to come up again, and you won't hear it from the mainstream media outlets, Barack Obama or John McCain.

Further reading:

Michael Geist

P2Pnet

Wikipedia Article on the ACTA "Agreement"

Link to Download the Actual Document

More TSA Madness

I think the TSA and the RIAA are learning from each other. Both are pursuing tactics that would drive their organization into the ground in the free market, yet both are protected by the government and therefore immortal.

BoingBoing's recent tale of a five-year-old detained by airport security because of a mistaken identity is hardly surprising at this point. It's a wonder they didn't taser the kid when he cried.

Telling quote:

"When his mother went to pick him up and hug him and comfort him during the proceedings, she was told not to touch him because he was a national security risk. They also had to frisk her again to make sure the little Dillinger hadn't passed anything dangerous weapons or materials to his mother when she hugged him."

Experience, Likability, Good Judgement and "Change, change, change"

Papa Clinton has been a popular headline recently, attacking the fellow Democratic nominees on behalf of his wife. Aaaand we're beginning to see the typical Clinton image-placing that got good ol' William in office. In other words, we're moving away from issues and into intangibles, where the Clintons hope to fight their rivals (mainly Barack Obama) on their own turf - empty platitudes.

So - what's important this time? Is it experience? Bill's been attacking Obama for his lack of experience in the senate, but senatorial experience sure wasn't important in 1992. Is likability the most important intangible? Hill's campaign seems to think so.

My favorite Clinton angle? Change, change, change. If being seen as a "change agent" is so crucial to the presidency, why isn't Vermin Supreme a frontrunner? I'm sure he'd change the country a fair bit.

Change, change, change. What does that mean? Makes about as much sense as Obama's "Hope" platform. On the Republican side, we don't even know Huckabee's and Romney's platforms. As far as I can gather, Huckabee wants to "make everything better", and Romney never actually thought he'd be running for the presidency and now finds himself in the awkward position of backtracking. Were Romney nominated, I wonder if Hannity would call him out on this flip-floppery.

Actually, I think we all know the answer to that. Hannity could escape from intellectual dishonesty and double-standardism if he'd just admit that changing opinions, in and of itself, is not a sign of dishonesty, unless you live in some neo-con Bizarro World where you somehow managed to come up with all of the right opinions the first time and quaint "information" is a mere distraction.

Tangents aside, in a country where a candidate with good judgement is only a priority for some 1/4 of America's voters, something like this had to happen. And each presidential election is only going to get more generic and more calculated. Because that's what we want, it's what we deserve, and it's what we're going to get.

Out Of Context

So Drudge is reporting that Stephen King has suggested that Jenna Bush be waterboarded.

In context you'd learn that the comment wasn't quite so personal. King feels that the usage of the torture method known as "waterboarding" is an important issue, suggesting facetiously that "someone in the Bush family" (he later says Jenna) should be waterboarded to bring the issue to the President's attention.

I am left to wonder if Sean Hannity will jump on the absolutely out-of-context quote as an example of Stephen's jump to the "vitriolic" left.

Wikipedia Entry on Waterboarding

Stephen King Interview

Toilet to Tap

One more reason I'm glad I don't live in Orange County, California: This Friday, the Orange County Water District will begin their process of "indirect potable water reuse", or recycling sewage water (after a lengthy purification treatment) as drinking water.

Though the idea is offsetting, I'm not entirely turned off by the idea (it's gross in theory but no grosser than eating, for example, maraschino cherries after you know how they're made). Were it not for the tendency of public officials and so-called "experts" to make purely economic decisions while calling out PR agencies to minimize the public's awareness of health risks, I might even be behind (ha!) the idea.

Still, read this: "The Groundwater Replenishment System, as the $481 million plant here is known, is a labyrinth of tubing and tanks that sucks in treated sewer water the color of dark beer from a sanitation plant next door, and first runs it through microfilters to remove solids. The water then undergoes reverse osmosis, forcing it through thin, porous membranes at high pressure, before it is further cleansed with peroxide and ultraviolet light to break down any remaining pharmaceuticals and carcinogens. The result, Mr. Markus [the plant general manager] said, “is as pure as distilled water” and about the same cost as buying water from wholesalers."

Yum. Anticipating public backlash. . . now.

New Age Sewage Spewage

Teletubby Plot Conspiracies

Elmo Saves Christmas isn't the only children's television series with potential for discussion. What about the strange world the Teletubbies infest? Great topic for discussion with friends!

Of course, this was all prompted by Teletubbyland Apocalypse, a long-held joke of mine.

Possible Teletubby explanations:

• The Teletubbies are the relics of an ancient alien race (the constructors of the metal control dome, now grassed-over), whose goal was to colonize the Earth. Following this theory, they may be actual members of this race who, despite their vast intellectual handicaps, found themselves immune to the strains of terrible geoviruses that caused the rest of the colonizers to flee and, eventually, die alone in space. Alternatively, they may be a genetic creation or animal species of this race implanted with torst-mounted monitoring devices and sent to survey the planet before the actual invasion (intended for the season finale).
• The Teletubbies live in a horrific dystopian future wherein the most significant population of humanity has been eliminated by their own weapons, bio and nuclear. The Tubby dome and so-called "baby sun" have been set up as sentries by some intelligence to be sure that such an occurrence never happens again. (This is backed by evidence from the first season; on two separate occurrences large rockets can be seen slowly rising in the background.) They are nourished and protected by their guardian, often seen (mistakenly) as a large blue vacuum. It is, of course, an ancient member of the forerunner civilization.
  

Do I think that I could get away with this on the Teletubby Wikipedia article? I think they check that one a little more often than "Elmo Saves Christmas".

"Privacy" No Longer Means Privacy

In what is sure to be another glorious public relations victory for the White House, national intelligence deputy director Donald Kerr has confirmed what we all already knew: "privacy" no longer means what we think it does.

The new definition of "privacy", according to the My Way article: "government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information."

I guess that it's okay for shady organizations to collect your personal information as long as they keep it secret. Let's rely on government and businesses' excellent track record for keeping secrets private.

War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery. Publicity is privacy.

My Way News - Say Goodbye to Privacy