Cruel and Unusual?

This is an interesting way to fight back against the death penalty. The US Supreme Court has blocked the execution of a Florida man to consider his appeal over the method used to carry out the punishment.

Clarence Hill was to be executed on Wednesday for the 1982 murder of a Pensacola police officer.

But the court wants to consider if the chemicals used in the execution cause pain - thus violating a Constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Anti-death penalty campaigners say the move could delay other US executions.

Hill had been strapped to a gurney and intra-venous lines were running into his arms late on Tuesday night, his lawyer said, when Justice Anthony Kennedy issued a temporary stay...

Lethal injection is the most widely used method of execution in the US, although some offer inmates the choice of alternatives like electrocution or the gas chamber.

The exact combination of chemicals used varies, but the process usually involves three stages, according to the Death Penalty Information Center - an anti-death penalty group.

The condemned inmate is injected with an anesthetic, which puts the inmate to sleep. Next flows pavulon or pancuronium bromide, which paralyses the entire muscle system and stops the inmate's breathing.

Finally, the flow of potassium chloride stops the heart.

Richard Dieter, head of DPIC, told the BBC: "The argument is that the chemicals may mask the pain of what is going on - we assume people are just put to sleep, but if you are paralyzed it may mask the fact that these people are under extreme pain." ...

Thanks Harry (a.k.a. Sugar Scone Boy) for the tip!

[2/21/06 update]

A similar defense is being used by Michael Angelo Morales who was scheduled for execution 12:01 a.m. Tuesday. His execution was postponed after two anesthesiologists refused to participate because of ethical concerns.

"Any such intervention would clearly be medically unethical," said the doctors, who have not been identified. "As a result, we have withdrawn from participation in this current process." The American Medical Association, the American Society of Anesthesiologists and the California Medical Association all opposed the anesthesiologists' participation as unethical and unprofessional.

Congress Fake Edits Wikipedia

Wow, check out this post from one of CNet's bloggers on how congressional staff are updating wikipedia entries in really annoying ways.

An extensive analysis reveals how juvenile official Washington secretly is, behind the mind-numbingly serious talk of public policy.

One edit listed White House press secretary Scott McClellan under the entry for "douche." Another said of Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma) that: "Coburn was voted the most annoying Senator by his peers in Congress. This was due to Senator Coburn being a huge douche-bag."

(Keep in mind these are the same holier-than-thou political climbers tasked with writing laws telling the rest of the country how to behave. Or else.)

What Are You Paying to Heat Your Home?

Exxon Mobil just reported annual profits of $36 Billion with revenues far exceeding it's closest competitor - Wal-Mart. While I'm generally a capitalist and I understand that corporations are going to do everything to maximize their profits, why do I still feel like I just got dick slapped in the face with an oil dripping dong? Part of it is probably because the Iraq War and recent acts of God would lead you to believe that oil is scarcer and more expensive to procure, process and distribute than at other times in recent memory. While this would expectedly lead to higher prices for the average consumer, apparently Exxon Mobile is charging us more than a proportional increase in cost to them.

Check out the article for details including Exxon Mobil's attempt to demure and how the Republican controlled legislature wants to give the oil industry even more tax cuts!

In one measure of Exxon Mobil's wealth and influence, its revenue of $371 billion surpassed the $245 billion gross domestic product of Indonesia, an OPEC member and the world's fourth most populous country, with 242 million people.

The company's huge profit report came as no surprise to the White House or to lawmakers in either party, but it arrived just as Congress was preparing to resume a fight over imposing a one-time windfall profits tax on the major oil companies.

Last fall, the Republican-controlled Senate passed a bill to extend about $60 billion worth of tax cuts over the next five years, but it also included a provision that would impose a one-year tax increase of $5 billion on the nation's largest oil companies. The measure is unlikely to survive. President Bush has already threatened to veto the tax bill if it includes the tax on oil companies, and House Republicans included no comparable measure in their own tax bill.

Another measure approved in the Senate would effectively remove the foreign tax credit that the nation's three largest oil companies, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips, receive for taxes paid in other countries. Most energy analysts do not see the measures winning approval in the House, but Exxon Mobil executives remain concerned.
...
Republican lawmakers were on the defensive on Monday. Not only are they under heavy pressure from party leaders and from the White House to kill the proposed tax on oil companies, but they also inserted more than $2 billion in additional tax breaks for oil and gas companies in the energy bill that Congress passed last November.

My Apartment Will Be Underwater

It's been pushing 60 degrees pretty consistently for the past month here in the New York City area. Typically, January is the coldest month in this area but we've been enjoying crazy warm weather most of this month. This article from the Wahington Post covers the possible "tipping point" that we're approaching with regards to climate change.

Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend.

This "tipping point" scenario has begun to consume many prominent researchers in the United States and abroad, because the answer could determine how drastically countries need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years. While scientists remain uncertain when such a point might occur, many say it is urgent that policymakers cut global carbon dioxide emissions in half over the next 50 years or risk the triggering of changes that would be irreversible.
...
Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer, who also advises the advocacy group Environmental Defense, said one of the greatest dangers lies in the disintegration of the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets, which together hold about 20 percent of the fresh water on the planet. If either of the two sheets disintegrates, sea level could rise nearly 20 feet in the course of a couple of centuries, swamping the southern third of Florida and Manhattan up to the middle of Greenwich Village.

However unpopular and harsh, people have to hear what the world's best scientists are telling us. This is apparently NOT what the Bush administration is about - check out this article from the NY Times on the shady suppression of one major scientist's attempts to spread the word. Before you call him a crackpot with some type of persecution complex, consider his stature in the scientific community - this isn't some guy putting together a time machine in his basement, but the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

God does have a sense of humor

The building of the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance, a $200 million complex designed by architect Frank Gehry, has hit yet another political snag. Inspectors have halted construction on some areas of the site following the discovery of Muslim graves. [Read the origins of this controversy here.]

By law, the state-sponsored Israel Antiquities Authorities (IAA) is obliged to block any construction that could damage historical ruins. To date, building on the 400,000 square-foot site near Independence Park has all been above ground, according to IAA spokesperson Osnat Guez. “No graves have been damaged.” ...

According to Jerusalem geographer Ronnie Ellenblum, this graveyard dates back to the seventh-century Byzantine period and was later used by Crusaders, Mamluks and finally Muslims. “It’s a huge, historical cemetery, one of the most important in Jerusalem,” he says. “But the graves should be moved, the living are more important than the dead.”

In the past, ultra-Orthodox Jews have clashed with city officials over graves under construction sites. The site of the new museum was known to have Muslim graves nearby and Muslim officials have worried from the start that more graves could be hidden underground.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has come under fire since it announced plans to build a museum of tolerance in Jerusalem and laid the cornerstone last year, with the help of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The international organisation’s mission is to combat anti-Semitism, racism, terrorism and genocide.

Don't you see the irony in this? A museum of "tolerance", literally squishing another's culture... I don't know God, that is kind of funny.

Do You Know What You Googled Today? The Government Wants to Know!

Just as we raised an eyebrow about Google's intentions last May, they might be deserving of some credit in their stand against a Justice Department subpeona. Below are some updates around the Justice Department's attempts to subpoena Google's search records in the name of protecting our children.

As someone who works in the technology field, I sometimes take for granted that people understand the reality of what the government is asking for. If this information were provided by Google, the government would know precisely what words were submitted through a Google search from a particular computer or network. While finding the person/entities who own that computer would require an extra step, it's not uncommon as this is precisely what the Music industry does to sue people who allegedly share music online.

Here's the backstory if you haven't seen it already. But to sum up: The Justice Dept is trying to subpoena Google's records as "part of a government effort to revive an Internet child protection law struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court."

Here's an update from the NY Times (note that MSN, Yahoo and AOL caved to the subpoena with nary a peep).

Kathryn Hanson, a former telecommunications engineer who lives in Oakland, Calif., was looking at BBC News online last week when she came across an item about a British politician who had resigned over a reported affair with a "rent boy."

It was the first time Ms. Hanson had seen the term, so, in search of a definition, she typed it into Google. As Ms. Hanson scrolled through the results, she saw that several of the sites were available only to people over 18. She suddenly had a frightening thought. Would Google have to inform the government that she was looking for a rent boy - a young male prostitute?

Ms. Hanson, 45, immediately told her boyfriend what she had done. "I told him I'd Googled 'rent boy,' just in case I got whisked off to some Navy prison in the dead of night," she said.

Ms. Hanson's reaction arose from last week's reports that as part of its effort to uphold an online pornography law, the Justice Department had asked a federal judge to compel Google to turn over records on millions of its users' search queries. Google is resisting the request, but three of its competitors - Yahoo, MSN and America Online - have turned over similar information.

Here's some more commentary from the NY Times.

We paid for mostly everything with credit and debit cards. Out of convenience, we embraced technologies meant to track our every move.

There are important distinctions, of course, between government prying and the emerging web of consumer surveillance. But they share a digital universe that facilitates and rewards watching. Spam, spyware and identity theft are only a taste of how exposed we have all willingly become as we enjoy the benefits of the networked world.

If the American public seems a bit confused about the raging debate of security versus civil liberties - Bush/Cheney versus the A.C.L.U. - it may be because the debate itself has been outpaced by technology. In our post-9/11, protowireless world, democracies and free markets are increasingly saturated with prying eyes from governments, corporations and neighbors. For better and worse, free societies are fast entering the world of total surveillance.

Halliburton's Dirty Water

Troops and civilians at a U.S. military base in Iraq were exposed to contaminated water last year, and employees for the responsible contractor, Halliburton Co., could not get their company to inform camp residents, according to interviews and internal company documents.

Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Cheney, disputes the allegations about water problems at Camp Junction City, in Ramadi, even though they were made by its own employees and documented in company e-mails.

"We exposed a base camp population (military and civilian) to a water source that was not treated," said a July 15, 2005, memo written by William Granger, the official for Halliburton's KBR subsidiary who was in charge of water quality in Iraq and Kuwait.

"The level of contamination was roughly 2x the normal contamination of untreated water from the Euphrates River," Granger wrote in one of several documents. The Associated Press obtained the documents from Senate Democrats who are holding a public inquiry into the allegations today....

Ben Carter, Halliburton's former water-treatment expert at Camp Junction City, said he discovered the problem last March, a statement confirmed by his e-mail the day after he tested the water. Though bottled water was available for drinking, the contaminated water was used for virtually everything else, including handwashing, laundry, bathing and making coffee, Carter said.

Another former Halliburton employee who worked at the base, Ken May of Louisville, said there were numerous instances of diarrhea and stomach cramps.

A spokeswoman for Halliburton said its own inspection found neither contaminated water nor medical evidence to substantiate reports of illnesses at the base...

"It is my opinion that the water source is without question contaminated with numerous micro-organisms, including Coliform bacteria," Carter wrote. "There is little doubt that raw sewage is routinely dumped upstream of intake much less than the required 2 mile distance.

"Therefore, it is my conclusion that chlorination of our water tanks while certainly beneficial is not sufficient protection from parasitic exposure."

Carter said he resigned in early April after Halliburton officials did not take any action to inform the camp population.

The water expert said he told company officials at the base that they would have to notify the military. "They told me it was none of my concern and to keep my mouth shut," he said.

Blog Truthiness

Thank you Gawker for pointing out the brilliance of Stephen Colbert. Excerpts from his interview with blogstar Andrew Sullivan who’s now posting his blog on Time.com:

Colbert: So edumacate me here: A blog is what? I know the kids do it, I hear it all the time with, like, iPod, I hear those two terms thrown around a lot.

Sullivan: It’s almost like you have truth that you give us every night. But some of us, we just struggle every day to put whatever little bit of truth we can find on the internet and call it a blog. It’s literally a web log, it’s a log of your random, incessant thoughts, on the web.

C: So a blog is web log? Is there an apostrophe, or do you guys not even have the strength for that? You’re just gonna jam two words together?

After the jump, Sullivan’s impressive answer and truthiness for the Times.

S: Over time it just became a “blog.”

C: “Blog.” It’s a beautiful word. It’s musical. So, uh, you type your thoughts and they appear on a screen instantly and that’s it. That’s what you do?

S: That’s what I do.

C: They used to call that typing. I don’t trust you guys, because anybody could do that, right?

S: You don’t. The only way you can trust anybody who blogs is by following them and making sure they’re not full of it all the time. The one sign of a good blogger is that he immediately corrects a mistake. And unlike the New York Times, where they can put all of their millions of mistakes in a little box in the corner every day which you never read, a blogger has to fess up, right there, just like you do every night.

C: Actually, I read the New York Times corrections. It’s the most entertaining part of that paper.

Hypocrisy of the European Union

Europe always manages to point its little finger at us, calling us the bad guys. Yea, we are the bad guys, but so are you. The EU is no-less guilty in its shady dealings around the world. Don't think we forgot, "The sun never sets on the British Empire" and all you're other colonial garbage.

In its annual report, Human Rights Watch said the [EU and] UK in particular was ignoring abuses in Russia and Saudi Arabia to secure business contracts...

The group said there was an "unseemly competition" between leaders from the UK, France and Germany to proclaim the closeness of their relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite human rights concerns in Chechnya.

The EU also "utterly failed" to tackle the US on its "practice of 'disappearing' terrorist suspects", Human Rights Watch (HRW) said.

It singled out France and Germany for pressing to lift the EU arms embargo on China despite a lack of progress on holding accountable those responsible for the crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Meanwhile, the UK has been pressing hard for Saudi Arabia to buy arms from British manufacturers "while remaining silent on the kingdom's abysmal human rights record", the report said...

Read the entire Human Rights Watch report here.

Domestic Spying continued...

Two leading civil rights groups filed lawsuits today against the Bush administration over its domestic spying program to determine whether the operation was used to monitor 10 defense lawyers, journalists, scholars, political activists and other Americans with ties to the Middle East.

The two lawsuits are the first major court challenges to the eavesdropping program. They were filed separately by the American Civil Liberties Union in Federal DistrictCourt in Detroit, and by the Center for Constitutional Rights in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

Both groups are seeking to have the courts order an immediate end to the program, which the groups say is illegal and unconstitutional. The Bush administration has strongly defended the legality and necessity of the surveillance program, and officials said the Justice Department would probably oppose the lawsuits on national security grounds...

The New York Times reports that domestic spying data has only lead to dead ends.

In anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy. (Read the entire story here.)

What do you get when you cross a jelly fish with a pig?

Why, glow-in-the-dark ham of course!

Scientists in Taiwan say they have bred three pigs that glow in the dark. Supposedly this research will help with the study of human disease, but come on, you know they just wanted to see a pig glow.

Taiwan is not claiming a world first. Others have bred partially fluorescent pigs before. But the researchers insist the three pigs they have produced are better.

They are the only ones that are green from the inside out. Even their heart and internal organs are green, they say.

To create them, DNA from jellyfish was added to about 265 pig embryos which were implanted in eight different pigs.

In daylight the researchers say the pigs' eyes, teeth and trotters look green. Their skin has a greenish tinge.

In the dark, shine a blue light on them and they glow torch-light bright.

The researchers say they hope the new, green pigs will mate with ordinary female pigs to create a new generation - much greater numbers of transgenic pigs for use in research.

Awww, cute glow-in-the-dark piglets! Do you think glow-in-the-dark is a recessive gene though?

Mummified Couch Potato

This is straight out of Hitchcock's Psycho. You know the last scene where Norman Bates goes up to the attic to visit his mother and swivels the chair around and to our horror, she isn't alive but a mummified corps! EEEK. Well I guess it could happen:

The mummified body of a woman who didn't want to be buried was found in a chair in front of her television set 2 1/2 years after her death, authorities said. Johannas Pope had told her live-in caregiver that she didn't want to be buried and planned on returning after she died, Hamilton County Coroner O'Dell Owens said Monday.

Pope died in August 2003 at age 61. Her body was found last week in the upstairs of her home on a quiet street. Some family members continued to live downstairs, authorities said. No one answered the doorbell at Pope's home Monday afternoon.

It could take weeks to determine Pope's cause of death because little organ tissue was available for testing, Owens said.

An air conditioner had been left running upstairs, and that allowed the body to slowly mummify, he said. The machine apparently stopped working about a month ago, and the body began to smell.

"Standing outside, one could smell death," Owens said...

"The caregiver is not someone you'd think was from another planet or really seems off the wall -- (she's) a pretty normal kind of person," he said. "But I think out of loyalty, friendship and love of her friend, (she) decided to keep the body at home."

Proving that Al-Qaida are stupid fucks

Showing how fucking obtuse these ass holes are, and how much they truly must hate their own people, Al-Qaida's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, said in a videotape that aired Friday, that the United States' recent decision to withdraw some troops from Iraq represented "the victory of Islam."

They must really love this war. You're calling out the U.S.? With this President?! Ha! Get it through your skull, the U.S. has no intention of ever leaving that region.

Al-Zawahri, wearing a white turban and gray robe and seated next to an automatic rifle, waved his finger for emphasis as he spoke in the two-minute excerpt aired by Al-Jazeera.

"I congratulate (the Islamic nation) for the victory of Islam in Iraq," he said.

Al-Zawahri apparently was referring to comments last month by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who said President Bush had authorized new troop cuts below the 138,000 level that prevailed for most of last year...

Al-Zawahri said the American forces "with their planes, missiles, tanks and fleets are mourning and bleeding, seeking for a getaway from Iraq."

I hate this war but this ass even convinced me to stay the course. Wow, maybe Bush put him up to this.

United in Hate

Television evangelist Pat Robertson and PresidentMahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran may not agree on much, but both suggested yesterday that the severe illness of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was deserved.

Speaking on his Christian Broadcasting Network's ''700 Club," Robertson said God was punishing Sharon for dividing the land of Israel. Sharon, who engineered Israel's pullout from the Gaza Strip last year, suffered a massive stroke Wednesday.

''Sharon was personally a very likable person, and I am sad to see him in this condition, but I think we need to look at the Bible and the Book of Joel. The prophet Joel makes it very clear that God has enmity against those who 'divide my land,'" Robertson said.

Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said Robertson's comments violated ''simple human decency" and were ''profoundly offensive."

Ahmadinejad, elected in June, previously made headlines by calling the Holocaust a myth. ''Hopefully, the news that the criminal of Sabra and Chatilla has joined his ancestors is final," he was quoted by the Iranian press as saying yesterday. An Israeli commission found Sharon indirectly responsible for the massacre of Palestinians by Christian Phalangist soldiers during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

The Science of Cute

I'm not sure what this NY Times article on the science of cuteness has to do with anything but it's an interesting read nonetheless.

Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others.

Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can't lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.

The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession.
...
Cuteness is distinct from beauty, researchers say, emphasizing rounded over sculptured, soft over refined, clumsy over quick. Beauty attracts admiration and demands a pedestal; cuteness attracts affection and demands a lap. Beauty is rare and brutal, despoiled by a single pimple. Cuteness is commonplace and generous, content on occasion to cosegregate with homeliness.

Kids At War

Happy New Year! Here's our first post of 2006...

This article from the NY Times talks about a 19 year old girl from Kansas who is about to be deployed to Iraq.

Likewise, much of Private [Katherine] Jordan's time at home on the eve of her deployment has been a portrait in contrasts: of a father's fierce pride and worry, but a service member's nonchalance and certainty; of a young woman who now fluently speaks the military language of acronyms and weapons systems, but who still also gossips with her old high school girlfriends like the teenager she is; of a soldier's new, intense focus on the task ahead in Iraq but her admission that, even now, she does not fully grasp all that has happened there.

"I don't know all the facts as much as I should," said Private Jordan, of the First Armored Division, 501st Forward Support Battalion, as she sat in her childhood home here. "What I know is that we're protecting our country still. We're concentrating on keeping insurgents away from the United States."

If Private Jordan was once ambivalent about Iraq, she now seems certain she wants to go. She said she knows that her job, as one of only a few female mechanics in her unit, could send her out to pick up disabled vehicles - potential targets for attack. Still, she said, she is more excited than nervous. And she is already anticipating the higher paychecks she will make in a war zone; she said she hopes to save $15,000 so she can buy a car when she gets home.

"Honestly," she said, "a lot of my friends like Iraq. It's not as bad as people say."

The author only briefly highlights misconceptions about the war in the quote I bolded above. How is the Iraq war about "protecting our country" anymore? If we had never started the war or if we walked out today, would these insurgents suddenly overrun the U.S.? Is that just the naïveté of youth speaking? Or maybe it's just that she's a 19 yr old kid who doesn't watch the news or read the paper? Or maybe she just forgot what dubious claims were made to justify the Iraq war even before it began and now buys into the non-sensical rationalization of the war?