Pinging stuff I care about.
kdka.com – Caller Warned DJs Of Water Intoxication Death:
“I want to say that those people drinking all that water can get sick and die from water intoxication,” said the caller.
“Yeah, we’re aware of that,” replied a DJ. “They signed releases so we’re not responsible, okay?”
If I were one of the children of the woman who died this way, I would spend the rest of my life figuring out how I was going to find and kill that DJ.
“The lungs of infected monkeys were destroyed in just days as their immune systems went into overdrive after a Canadian laboratory rebuilt the virus…. Symptoms appeared within 24 hours of exposure to the virus, and the subsequent destruction of lung tissue was so widespread that, had the monkeys not been put to sleep a few days later, they would literally have drowned in their own blood.”
No wonder that thing killed so many people so fast. The article doesn’t mention whether these findings solve the mystery of why the 1918 flu killed mostly young, healthy people.
The story: “Expert Wants to Decertify Global Warming Skeptics.” The source: a blog entry on the Senate’s web pages. The blogger? James Inhofe’s communications director Marc Morano, one of the first publicizers of the Swift Boat Veterans For Hatchet Jobs. Using the years of experience as reporter and producer for the Rush Limbaugh tv show he has emerged to protect the integrity of American science!
To Digg’s credit, this got one single solitary digg (Or at least that’s the total it ended up with; I don’t know how digg works too much). And I don’t know if it even showed up on Reddit. Though I seem to remember them falling pretty hard for that hoax about the Bush administration pressuring Grand Canyon staffers not to admit the age of the Canyon in deference to Creationists.
I recently got my Linux machine going in my room. To get it on the network, I (at long last) upgraded our wireless router to the faster “g” protocol, and bought a “g” pci card for the linux box, and that was it.
We haven’t done much with desktop machines in the house for a while. There’s an aged iMac which my wife sometimes uses for quick browsing and which the kids use to watch Homestar Runner and play flash games in the living room. My wife and I both have laptops (actually they’re both my “work” laptops, but she often uses one). But there’s been no even slightly modern, up to date desktop in the house for a while.
Well, OK, there still isn’t; the linux machine I’m typing on is an old Dell thing that my wife got from work for $20 when they sold them off after upgrading. For all that it’s not a bad machine: 800MHz, the RAM was at 128M and I doubled that, and I put a big ol’ extra hard drive in there that I had.
It’s got Ubuntu 6.10 (“Edgy Eft”) on it now, and the neat stuff I’ve got going with it so far is…
Azureus for filesharing. (Horrible resource hog but it seems to be the top of the line for bittorrent.)
Got Boodler running and have an all-night rainstorm programmed to lull us to sleep.
Enabled my wacom tablet so that I can draw neat stuff at this desktop using the Gimp.
An example of which follows (When in doubt, draw a dragon!)
Goodnight!
Apparently a kid I grew up with, went to school with from elementary through high school, and who seemed like a good guy at the time (never a friend of mine but never on bad terms with him either), founded and runs Blackwater Security. I find this out from Jim, and the articles about him on the web seem all to be quoting this article by Chris Hedges:
One of the arguments used to assuage our fears that the mass movement being built by the Christian right is fascist at its core is that it has not yet created a Praetorian Guard, referring to the paramilitary force that defied legal constraints, made violence part of the political discourse and eventually plunged ancient Rome into tyranny and despotism. A paramilitary force that operates outside the law, one that sows fear among potential opponents and is capable of physically silencing those branded by their leaders as traitors, is a vital instrument in the hands of despotic movements. Communist and fascist movements during the last century each built paramilitary forces that operated beyond the reach of the law.
And yet we may be further down this road than we care to admit. Erik Prince, the secretive, mega-millionaire, right-wing Christian founder of Blackwater, the private security firm that has built a formidable mercenary force in Iraq, champions his company as a patriotic extension of the U.S. military. His employees, in an act as cynical as it is deceitful, take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. These mercenary units in Iraq, including Blackwater, contain some 20,000 fighters. They unleash indiscriminate and wanton violence against unarmed Iraqis, have no accountability and are beyond the reach of legitimate authority. The appearance of these paramilitary fighters, heavily armed and wearing their trademark black uniforms, patrolling the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, gave us a grim taste of the future. It was a stark reminder that the tyranny we impose on others we will one day impose on ourselves.
If you’d rather listen to Erik’s own description of Blackwater and his history, he’s interviewed here, where he compares Blackwater to eighteenth century privateers.
Robert “Iraq For Sale” Greenwald labels him a war profiteer, which, well, I imagine mercenaries make profits during war, yes. If mercenaries aren’t war profiteers, nobody is. And Greenwald also details his deep involvement with Republican causes, which is absolutely in character, for him or for any other fairly traditional young feller from our school. Although apparently he found the first Bush’s administration, in which he interned, excessively liberal. Cause they let homosexuals into the White House and passed the Clean Air Act. So he went all Pat Buchanan. Being a conservative, religious Republican was de rigeur in our community, but apparently Erik went really, really far down that road. (Of course, Pat Buchanan probably does not approve of Blackwater and America’s use thereof even one tiny little smidgen…)
I heard about this tonight from Jim, who read about it in David Brin’s blog.
Yikes.
Like I said, seemed like an OK guy in school. One I had zero in common with but one I had no problem with and who never seemed to have a problem with me. He’s younger than me. And he was a Navy SEAL and founded the most notorious mercenary corporation in the world.
Mindblowing.