While warning on potential security threats, Napolitano also hinted that travel between the United States and New Zealand could be streamlined for frequent travellers. Ahead of a meeting with Prime Minister John Key, Napolitano said she would be viewing the "smart gate" system that operates between Australia and New Zealand tomorrow.Of course, cattle class TSA screening will continue for the rest of the mob, where grandmother crotch anomalies just add to the holidaying experiences. Here's Vanity Vair with some long form journalism on how all that security blanket is a waste of money. Something to read at the airport while you're waiting for your pre-flight anal probe and mouth swab.
American forces were soon engaged in atrocities that resulted in the deaths of tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of civilians as well as the burning of villages and the widespread use of torture to extract information. Brigadier General Robert Hughes defended the actions before Senate investigators in 1902 on grounds that would be familiar to the ancients: "These people," he said, "are not civilized."HT Arts & Letters Daily.
Cain's first execution, he told the Baptist Press, was done strictly by the book. "There was a psshpssh from the machine, and then he was gone," Cain recalled. "I felt him go to hell as I held his hand. Then the thought came over me: I just killed that man. I said nothing to him about his soul. I didn't give him a chance to get right with God. What does God think of me? I decided that night I would never again put someone to death without telling him about his soul and about Jesus.""Choose" Baptist Pentecostal Rehab and you're OK. Opt out, like the Angola Three, and you're in a sub-Abu Gharib world of inhuman treatment.
 |
| Nicked from here, HT BoingBoing. |
1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.That's ripped from here, which has much more depressing evidence of the continuing decline in American intelligence. But screw the adults, what about the children?
42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.
80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.
70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
57 percent of new books are not read to completion.
70 percent of books published do not earn back their advance.
70 percent of the books published do not make a profit.
As many as 42 percent of American children come from families without the “luxury” disposable income to purchase new books, according to a NYTimes “Fixes” blog post, and tens of millions of families have no books at home at all.HT Melville House Publishing via onegoodmove.
Some key points:
- It would require that countries participating ban parallel import for any copyright holder who wants it. That is, if a copyright holder says no, countries would have to block your ability to purchase legal and authorized products in one country and import them into another. This is the so-called "grey market" which should be perfectly legal, but which many companies would like to block so they can price things much higher in some countries.
- It would require criminal enforcement for certain cases of circumventing DRM even when there's no copyright infringement, going beyond existing treaties even when there's no copyright infringement. There are some exceptions, but rather than allow countries to determine their own exceptions, it defines the exceptions and actually says countries cannot go beyond those.
- It would impose liability on ISPs for dealing with infringing works that goes well beyond the DMCA. Yes, Hollywood may finally be able to force ISPs to act as their personal business model cops -- something they've been unable to do in the US.
- Along those lines, there would be "legal incentives" for ISPs to go above and beyond that in helping copyright holders.
- Forget privacy. ISPs would be required to identify users on request, going well beyond existing law.
- Expand what is considered patentable, going in the opposite direction of what's needed. Most troubling, it would allow patents on inventions even if the inventions do "not result in the enhancement of the known efficacy of that product." This seems to go against the very purpose of patent law, but the USTR has already shown it couldn't care much less than actually obeying the Constitutional underpinnings of patents or copyright law.
- Continues the troubling and problematic idea that patents must be assumed valid, even if they were only briefly reviewed.
- A requirement to forbid third party opposition of patent applications. This is particularly ridiculous. Allowing third parties to oppose patent applications (as is allowed with trademarks) would certainly help prevent some really bad patent applications from getting through. How can the USTR justify not allowing such a basic concept of letting third parties point out bad patents before they're approved. Especially when you combine this with the "presumption of validity" in patents once granted, it looks like the USTR is trying to increase the rubber stamping of patent approvals.
The first sign that he was not exactly committed to intellectual integrity was his choice of textbook for the course: an abominable book called America: The Last Best Hope, by William Bennett. Yes, THE William Bennett, Reagan’s Secretary of Education, the buffoon who sermonized on virtue until his gambling losses added up so high that they drowned out his pomposities, the man who once scolded a child in public for wearing a Bart Simpson t-shirt.
Bennett’s title sums up the thesis of his textbook clearly: America is literally, simply, the last and best hope for the human species. Tough luck, China — or Burma, or Ecuador, or any other nation on the planet — because we R it, the alpha and omega. It’s a classic reactionary thesis: “I can’t imagine any nation ever being as great as America; therefore no nation ever will be.”
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| The Parent Company Trap | ||||
| ||||
It’s clear to me he is a liar and a fool. New Zealanders should protest his economic and trade policies at every step. Our Prime Minister John Key should use one of those precious few minutes on the phone with the gilded one to tell him to rack off with his protectionism and his bailouts. They damage America and they damage the rest of the world. The honeymoon is over.There's increasingly smaller differences in the political management between the Bush/Cheney years and the Obama regime. Bush put up steel tariffs. Obama is protecting the sacred cows of US Dairy and the dogs of automobile manufacturing:
He is a liar because he promised a change to the status quo in Washington and he promised not to make the same mistakes from the 1930s that helped turn a recession into a depression. Yet he has done just that. He is a fool because he appointed exactly the wrong people to run his economic policies and has not intervened to stop them doing even more of the ruinous things started under Bush and Cheney.
Mr. Obama and his advisers expect G.M. to emerge from court protection in a few months as a new, radically smaller company owned by the federal government, the United Automobile Workers union and its bondholders.The economic damage is going to be painful enough, but there is little hope or change elsewhere either. Airport security continues to devise more circles of hell, from naked body scanners to fingerprinting outgoing Americans. Wiretapping of US citizens is continuing. There's talk of rape photos from Abu Ghraib being suppressed by the White House, on the grounds that they would "further inflame anti-American opinion" and "put our troops in danger."
The settlers are arguing that their human rights would be violated if they were made to move to Israel. That's right. It used to be that a person could fulfill his Zionist destiny in a place like Petah Tikva, but no more: Now, it's a sin against God, apparently, to live anywhere but in a government-subsidized trailer on a barren hill in the mountains of Samaria.Is Obama's hand constrained by Chief of Staff Rahm "son of Irgun" Emanuel at all? His brother, Ari Emanuel, is the inspiration for Jeremy Piven's Ari Gold character in the TV series Entourage. Clearly there's enough Cheney-like arrogance in the family to get what they want:
A year ago, the Guns and Ammo Warehouse was selling, each month for $1,000 each, about 10 of their AR-15s, a semi-automatic civilian version of the army's M-16 assault rifle. Howley says he can now sell 45 a week, when he has them...Note, hunting rifles aren't selling. Now the Department of Homeland Security warns of the rise of domestic extremist right wing zealots:
"All the hand guns are selling and I can't get more in. I'm wearing a $3,000 hand gun. That's expensive and even they are sold out," he says. "When the guns come in I sell in a day or two what used to sit on the wall for weeks..."Even big department stores, such as Wal-Mart, are complaining that daily shipments of ammunition have all but dried up and that when stock does come in it sells out the same day.
"The largest gun show in Virginia was two weeks after the election," says Howley. "It sold out of ammo on the first day. People were just wheeling it out by the cart load.
Meantime, what's up with the GOP? The rent-a-cause teabaggers party or that Glenn Beck, highlighted by RB, shows they're leading by example in the Loony Tunes department. Bill Maher, you're always welcome in Wellington if things go Mad Max on you over there.A footnote attached to the report by the Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis defines "rightwing extremism in the United States" as including not just racist or hate groups, but also groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority.
"It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration," the warning says.
The speed of the trial — two relatively brief hearings — is likely to feed widespread suspicion among Iraqis that al-Maliki's government orchestrated the process, although defense lawyers said they had no evidence of interference. Spokesmen for Bush and for the State Department both called the verdict "a matter for the Iraqi judicial system."
This is somewhat at odds with popular sentiment:
An ABC News/BBC/NHK poll released Thursday found that 62 percent of Iraqis surveyed considered al-Zeidi a hero and only 24 percent considered him a criminal. Support was highest among Sunni Arabs — 84 percent — and lowest among the Kurds at 38 percent, according to ABC.
However, Zeidi received the minimum sentence. I'm not sure if parole exists in Iraq but it won't be long before he's free again. My bet is Zeidi will end up running for election.
Meantime, a group of Canadian lawyers are trying to prevent George W Bush from entering the country. Lawyers Against War claim:
- George W. Bush, former President of the United States and Commander is Chief of the Armed Forces, is inadmissible to Canada under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), section 35(1)(a) because of overwhelming evidence that he has ‘committed, outside Canada, torture and other offences referred to in sections 4 to 7 of the Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Act (CAHWC); and,
- the George W. Bush Administration has engaged in “systematic or gross human rights violations, or a war crime or a crime against humanity within the meaning of subsections 6(3) to (5) of the CAHWC.
We request that the RCMP War Crimes Section immediately take the following steps:
- begin an investigation of George W. Bush for aiding, abetting and counseling torture between November 13, 2001 and November 2008 at Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Bagram prison in Afghanistan and other places; and,
- advise the Prime Minister, Attorney General of Canada and Ministers of Immigration and Public Safety that the George W. Bush administration is a “ government that has engaged in torture and other war crimes and crimes against humanity and therefore G.W. Bush, as former President, is also inadmissible under section 35(1)(b) of the IRPA.
