Strange
Day

WTO to announce schedule for disbanding
Okay…what’s going on here.This just does not look right. Something is going on here. I’m waiting for Alan Funt to step out.
You just don’t give up the power they had. Or even risk it on structural reorganization.
Read it.

I can see the future.
At least the Washington Post‘s version of it.
They apparently have started posting Sunday’s stories a wee bit early.

White House was terrorists’ intended 9/11 target
One half block away.
This same plane, which crashed into nothing but ground, shattered windows hundreds of feet away through the sheer force of it’s impact.

“Now Adelman is locked in a battle against the Belo media corporation, owner of The Dallas Morning News, which sent him a legalistic letter this week demanding that BarkingDogs.org remove all “deep links” to the DallasNews.com site.
“‘Deep links’ point to specific content within a site, allowing readers to bypass the site’s front page. Instead of linking to a specific article within The Dallas Morning News’s site, Belo wants Adelman to only link to the site’s main page.”

— Site Barks About Deep Link
Look! Up there! It’s the story that wouldn’t die!
This is a stupid argument that will go nowhere. I can almost garauntee that several things are going to haappen here:
Some judge will rule in favor of a company like below, stating that sites can require people to only link to their front page. Then all the people out there watching from home will yawn, and change the channel. It will be totally unenforcable.
Someone will realise it would be incredibly easy to prevent people from deep linking. You need only require that anytime someone is accessing a low level page in your site be referred by a higher level page. Information like this has been tracked since the creation of the modern web browser. You’d simply need a web server designed to check it each time.
I wouldn’t take bets on how long a shelf life that software has, though. You wouldn’t even notice it was up, before it was taken down because the hits to your site fell like a rock.
It’s called footnotes. Get the fuck over it.

“In a stinging rebuke of the Justice Department, a federal judge ruled Wednesday that Attorney General John Ashcroft could not nullify Oregon law that allows physicians to help terminally ill patients kill themselves.’

— USATODAY
Does it disturb anyone else that people like Ashcroft and Rumesfeld, who were never elected to their positions, are essentially making law and setting US policy?
It’s one thing to do it behind the guise of the executive branch. But they aren’t even trying to conceal their actions.
In this case, the directive issued by Ashcroft went against the results of two legal and uncontested elections. Free country huh.
Reminds me of congress telling the District that if they even released the results of the vote for legalization of medicinal marajuana, that all our federal funding would be cut. They didn’t say our decision was illegal, immmoral, or wrong. They just said we shouldn’t even be talking about it.
“FIRE!”

Ya know what they say about art students.

“The bill also would make it easier for Internet service providers to report suspicious activity on their networks. Current law prohibits service providers from reporting user activity unless it presents an immediate risk of death or injury, and allows users to sue for damages if their privacy is violated.
“Smith’s bill would loosen those requirements to enable service providers to report threats that are not immediate, and would protect them from lawsuits when they do so. Providers would face penalties if they did not store electronic records, such as customer e-mail, for at least 90 days.”

— USATODAY
On first perusal of this article, I catch two things.
One, providers, even under current laws, are expected to report custommers they believe are planning to injure themselves or others. The only way this could be accomplished is that everything you send through your ISP is not only scanned for buzzwords, but literally read for meaning, outtng the words in context.
privacy… hah.
And since this data is located on the ISPs servers, do they now have the right to sell what they learn about you to other commpanies or individuals. It would sure seem so, considering the resukts of many of the lawsuits that occured after the dotcoms all went bust.
But I pitty the ISPs as well. They are legally required to store copies of all your transmissions for 90 days? The small office I work in easily transmits gigabytes of information by email each month alone.
We’re talking terabytes of storage for small ISPs alone. While this is not impossible at the moment, usage increases exponentially each year.

“Luke J. Helder, the 21-year-old college student arrested in connection with a spate of mailbox pipe bombings, has admitted that he manufactured and planted the explosive devices, the FBI said Wednesday.’

— MSNBC & The AP
What no one seems to be mentioning here is how wrong the FBI profilers were in this case. They weren’t only wrong, their profile of the suspect was nearly the exact opposite of the man now said to have confessed.
The FBI released a profile just a few days ago, describing the suspect as an ‘older american male’, who most likely had a previous career as a traveling lone worker, such as a mailman. This was supposedly reinforced by what was being called a circular pattern to the bomb placements.
The use of the adjective ‘circular’ left me scratching myself, since the map I was looking at looked pretty straight and flat.
The man currently in custody is a 21 year old college student who plays in a band. He was openly anti-establishment. Far from doing anything in a circle, short of his future nighttime activities in prison, he was actually driving across the country.
Hey… you gotta hand it to the FBI… they had the ‘male’ part correct.

“A report released at a conference this week suggests a parent should be very worried because high school students with body piercings tend also to have smoked, used alcohol, had sex, skipped school and gotten into fights. ”
The author of the report proudly annonced that later this week he would be releasing several new reports such as "Black Males – More likely to commit crime" and other assinine topics

— Metafilter

Bruce Willis Buys Girl Scout Cookies for U.S. Troops

Scientists’ deaths are under the microscope.
Do you wanna feel good today?
Start off thinking about how many ‘enemies of the state’, like Iraq, Iran, and Korea have fairly openly admitted to their biolgical and chemical weapons programs.
Also keep in mind that most western powers officially closed down their biological weapons programs deccades ago. The men who originated and ran these programs are slowly getting old and dieing.The few people replacing them have very little practical experience.
And now, over the course of five months, 11 of the worlds top microbiologists, all from non-enemy states, have died of unnatural causes.

“A find of Bashkir scientists contraries to traditional notions of human history: stone stabs which is 120 million years covered with the relief map of Ural Region.”

— Pravda
I don’t know what to say. Read the article.
While I long ago stopped believing in the “fertile crecent” as the birth of civilization, this would simply throw out everything we know about human evolution.
Keeping in mind, of course, I know nothing abvout Pravda’s reliability, and the highly suspect quality of it’s translation.

Civilian Service
“In many parts of the world, in many battles, leaders of armed movements enlist young children – both boys and girls – to carry out military or terrorist operations. In some cases, these children and teens are regularly drugged with substances that will make them more aggressive in their actions and less apprehensive when it comes to one’s natural fear of losing limbs or life. In these situations, it becomes much more difficult by moral standards (if not by those standards related to internationally accepted rules of war) to differentiate between a soldier and civilian. Certainly, when the child is shooting at you and is dressed in military garb, one could understand the viewpoint that this child is in fact a soldier. But from the kid’s perspective, it’s not quite that clear.
“There are other examples of this blurred line between civilian (or forced fighter) and members of a military force. In the earliest days of our confrontation with the Taliban, there were many stories written about the forced recruitment of young males who were handed a gun and sent to the front lines. In many cases, these ‘soldiers’ were given no viable alternative. Either they joined the battle or they were killed and their family members were endangered. So when the front lines of the Taliban resistance were obliterated, one can assume that among the dead were many of these young men who chose to stand in the line of fire only because the alternative was even worse – and in many cases they were likely supportive of the other side. After all, the Afghan people were the most tormented victims of the Taliban for years before most of us heard of their horrible regime.
“Under dictatorial rulers, being forced to fight against one’s own personal cause is commonplace. In a recent article in The Atlantic on Saddam’s rule in Iraq, Mark Bowden (author of Black Hawk Down) describes a scenario faced by one combatant during the Gulf War:
“There was no hope: he foresaw death everywhere. If you went toward the American lines, they would shoot you. If you stayed in the open, they would blow you up. If you dug a hole and buried yourself, American bunker-buster bombs would stir your remains with the sand. If you ran, your own commanders would kill you?because they would be killed if their men fled. If a man was killed running away, his coffin would be marked with the word “jaban,” or “coward.” His memory would be disgraced, his family shunned. There would be no pension for them from the state, no secondary school for his children. “Jaban” was a mark that would stain the family for generations. There was no escaping it.
Some things are worse than staying with your friends and waiting to die. Hussain’s unit manned an anti aircraft gun. He never even saw the American fighter jet that took off his leg.”…
“So is the person described above (and the thousands of his fellow fighters who lost much more than legs) a soldier, or a civilian placed in the line of fire by an insane ruler who calls for holy martyrdom from the safety of an underground bunker?
“This is the situation for many citizens who live under the heavy hand of a tyrant. They live for years under the dictatorship of a madman and often their only way out is to be fodder on the front lines, killed at the hands of their liberators. And somewhere, there is always another thug collecting kids for the next unholy battle. “

—nextdraft.com

Musharraf Claims Victory in Vote to Extend Term
Oh wait… let me look suprised.
😐