Category — Uncategorized

I don’t go to theaters anymore because the “megaplex” has become more of a large living room with a big screen television than a real theater, and the popcorn isn’t real. I long for the days of my youth when the theater was huge and the ingredients in the popcorn bucket were butter, popcorn, butter, and salt with extra butter available on request.

When listening to the BBC coverage of the Cannes Film Festival last night I was intrigued by the coverage of Opie Taylor’s new film, The DaVinci Code. While unable to go into detail because of a non-disclosure agreement, Vincent Dowd felt the film “verges on the mediocre”, but didn’t quite make it.

Obviously our own entertainment reporter, Mustang Bobby, scanned the initial reviews in The DaVinci Hose and finds that the movie is panning out, not a good thing.

Caroline Briggs in her formal BBC review essentially says it has all of the vices and none of the virtues of the novel.

The consensus seems to be that the villains are the best part of the movie.

Just in case you don’t read Michael, PZ Myers, Maru, Misty, Digby, Rook, or Steve, I would like to mention that being a member of Mensa¹ is no guarantee of common sense or even logical thought processes.

It would take one of the Solons of UseNet to decide if Godwin’s Law was violated, as the violator himself invokes the comparison about his own views on a matter.

What makes this obscene suggestion that the US invoke The Final Solution to deal with immigration problems even worse, is that the commission that oversees the official records of the concentration camps has just announced a change to make them more widely available.

The BBC reports on the Punctilious Nazi archive of death:

Archivist Udo Jost showed us the book from the Matthausen camp, which showed that hundreds of Russians termed “political prisoners” by the Nazis had died on 20 April, 1942.

The cause of death was filed as “shrapnel from bombing”. But the fact that the men died precisely every second minute, on Adolf Hitler’s birthday, suggests they were really killed on the commandant’s orders.

The archive contains records on 17 million people, men, women, and children, who were swept up throughout Europe. These people were “guilty” of being Jewish, Rom, disabled, homosexual, or dissenting.

Update: Steve Gilliard has Vox Day’s attempt to respond using the standard “reading comprehension” ploy, i.e. “you are too stupid to understand what I wrote.”

Poor Vox is in full “cat on a tile floor” mode, and I would note that the Matthausen camp is in Austria, so the Russian prisoners were imported, not deported. This was part of the Nazi “guest worker” program.

1. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a recovering Mensan. I left because they redesigned the Mensa Bulletin to make it more “modern”. This was accomplished by decimating the letters section to make room for worthless graphics and the use of a sans serif font that I found uncomfortable to read. The other members were good, bad, and indifferent. About the only difference from the common run of people was an insistence on citing sources for any claim made, just like blogs.

This is certainly a waste of time and paper: US bans arms sales to Venezuela.

Chavez doesn’t buy arms from the US. His last big deal was with Spain, and I think he buys AK-47s for his army.

The claim about Venezuela supporting Colombian guerrillas is a bit of smoke of mirrors. The Colombian military chased a guerrilla band into Venezuela, and the Venezuelan government got bent out of shape over the presence of Colombian troops on Venezuelan soil.

It’s not like the US would deploy thousands of troops to the US-Mexican border to prevent incursions… Oh, never mind.

Update: Via Michael in comments, Chavez is talking about selling Venezuela’s 21 F-16s to Iran or Cuba, since they can’t buy parts from the US.

This was amusing: BBC Apologizes for Interview Gaffe.

The BBC wanted someone to comment on the verdict in the Apple Corps vs. Apple Computer court case in Britain so they contacted Guy Kewney, an expert on Internet music downloads for an interview with their consumer affairs correspondent, Karen Bowerman.

While Mr. Kewney was waiting in one reception area, Guy Goma, a Congolese man applying for a technology-related job at the BBC, was waiting in another area.

Whoever was sent to collect Mr. Kewney collected Mr. Goma instead, and Mr. Goma commented on the decision.

Goma told the BBC his interview was stressful, but added he was prepared to return to the airwaves. He said he was “happy to speak about any situation,” the BBC reported.

I’m not exactly sure how one qualifies as an expert on ‘Net music downloads – I would think that owning an iPod would probably suffice.

As both Billmon in Vox Pollsteri and Athenae in It Doesn’t Matter If You Like It point out, the law is not a popularity contest.

If you pull people over for speeding or running a stop sign, they don’t say: “Thank you for making me aware that I was putting others in danger.” People don’t like vehicle and traffic laws. The “55mph speed limit” saved lives and gas, but it certainly wasn’t a popular choice.

There are ways to change laws, and to amend the Constitution. If people don’t like the Fourth Amendment protections or the right to privacy, they can act to change them.

But, until the people act to make changes, violating the current rights and protections given to people is illegal. There is a “technical” term for people who do it: criminal.

If you check you will find that there are a number of pre-paid phones available for purchase, but don’t get one over the ‘Net, and don’t use anything but cash.

I have a TracFone simply because you can buy time for it almost everywhere – convenience stores, office supply, department stores, building supply stores – pretty much everywhere they take money.

You only pay for what you use and there are all kinds of different deals and discounts so read the agreement.

There exists no link between me and that telephone in anyone’s database. If I call you and you have caller ID, you will get number and nothing else. If you call directory assistance that number won’t appear.

I got the phone because of the loss of landlines during hurricanes and to make it easier for my Mother and clients to contact me. Its lack of existence in the data base is just a side benefit.

United States Intelligence Community

The “Community” is made up of sixteen organizations, and eight of them are within the Department of Defense.

Four are joint service organizations:

• Defense Intelligence Agency
• National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
• National Reconnaissance Office
• National Security Agency

And four are elements of the individual services:

• Air Intelligence Agency
• Army Intelligence
• Office of Naval Intelligence
• Marine Corps Intelligence Activity

There is one, and only one, independent intelligence entity in the Community: the Central Intelligence Agency.

Seven other organizations in the Community are parts of other Cabinet-level Departments.

It should be noted that the only intelligence agency not faulted in the run-up to the Iraq War was the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), but let’s not reward competence.

If Hayden becomes the Director of the CIA, nine of the sixteen voices at the table will belong to uniformed military officers.

CNet reports that in addition to Qwest, the following companies also told NSA NO: RCN, AOL Time Warner, Comcast, Cox Communications, Cablevision Systems, Cingular Wireless, Microsoft, T-Mobile and EarthLink.

As I keep saying: if this was legal and above board these companies wouldn’t have refused to participate. They have received enough complaints about selling their customer lists to others, that they know people don’t like it.

Businesses don’t like it either. I’ve signed enough non-disclosure agreements over the years to be able to say that businesses of any size don’t want their competitors to know who they call.

The NSA doesn’t have the people to handle this workload, so they are going to hire a contractor and there is no guarantee that the contractor won’t run a few commercial searches while working on the contract. The potential for abuse is huge.

Update: Michael adds Working Assets to the list of the “no” group, and writes about his exchange with Verizon concerning their complicity.

Quiddity has an important Mother’s Day reminder at Uggabugga.

Apparently concerned that they might be sued by the family of the deceased alligator, CNN reports: Hunters think they killed deadly gator.

Even if this particular alligator didn’t kill the individual currently in the morgue with two missing arms, I think the fact that two human arms were found inside the alligator indicates he killed someone.

Why are they showing more concern for the reputation of a ‘gator than they did for Wen Ho Lee or Richard Jewell?

The Culture Ghost makes clear what a lot of people are feeling: candidates are not going to receive votes just because of a party label.

I’m not voting for anyone in the Florida Senate race this year, because there is no one running that I want to win. When Bill Nelson voted for the new Bankruptcy Bill he lost my vote. If these people go to Washington and vote against me, they shouldn’t come home and expect me to vote for them.

I’m sick and tired of voting against things; I want something to vote for.

I don’t want “electable” candidates; I want people who stand for something. If you can’t convince people that your positions are the right ones, you don’t deserve the office.

Billmon has a great piece comparing the view of people ignoring the data mining with the Leviathan.

The text of Thomas Hobbes’s magnum opus is tough sledding because English has changed a lot since 1660, but the essential point is that people must reasonably accept that the ruler is allowed to do whatever he wants because society would sink into anarchy without his protection. The short version is: father knows best.

While Qwest didn’t get involved in the illegal data transfer [if it wasn’t illegal Qwest would have been forced to comply], at the time they were cash poor and made a deal with the Carlyle Group, selling them their directory publishing arm, QwestDex.

After you suck up all of those phone numbers, you want to find out who they belong to, which is trivial when you buy the directory information from the telephone book publishers. Of course, these will be classified intelligence contracts, so the public will never know about them.

This information isn’t available for the pre-paid cell phones that criminals and terrorists use, so they only have information on tax paying, law abiding citizens. [This will be changed in PATRIOT ACT III – the Empire gets Peevish when Darth Cheney orders pre-paid phones banned from the realm.]

CNN QuickVote Poll:

Which man would you say was more honest as president?

The Big Dog 74%

The Shrubbery 26%

Update: Jane at FDL has the reason for the poll: Jonesing for Bubba.