Mr. Toast

Manning had been tasked with evaluating the arrest of 15 Iraqis rounded up by the Iraqi Federal Police for printing “anti Iraq” literature. “The Iraqi federal police wouldn’t cooperate with U.S. forces, so I was instructed to investigate the matter, find out who the ‘bad guys’ were, and how significant this was for the FPs,” he wrote.

But when Manning had the literature translated, he discovered it was a scholarly critique of Iraq Prime Minister Al-Maliki titled Where Did the Money Go?, he wrote. The document was nothing more than a “benign political critique … following the corruption trail within the PM’s cabinet.

“I immediately took that information and ran to the [U.S. Army] officer to explain what was going on. He didn’t want to hear any of it. He told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding MORE detainees.

All very interesting. The guy is toast. Regarding his earlier issues with a superior, he should have put everything in a memo form and passed it around first.


Rarely has a train caused so much trouble for its operator as the third generation ICE has for German railway operator Deutsche Bahn (DB). This was the first high-speed train to be designed by industry alone, with Siemens overseeing the creation of a vehicle that seemed to have a knack for malfunctioning. When the first trains rolled into operation 10 years ago, passengers complained of defective air conditioners and clogged toilets. Defective couplings later paralyzed ICE operations, an axle broke in Cologne in summer 2008 and recently a door flew off a train traveling at full speed.

This susceptibility to breakdowns was particularly humiliating for the Munich-based company which aimed to challenge its French competitor Alstom, a company with a glowing industrial reputation for its successful high-performance trains. Alstom holds the world record in rail travel with a speed of 575 kph (357 mph).

Why a fiasco? Because the impetus is from Siemens. Nobody even mentions Alstom.


Competent vs ideology. Practical vs ideology. What works at the lowest cost vs ideology. And so on. Everything vs ideology. The majority of the country doesn’t care about ideology, especially from those on the extreme right and left who control both parties. They just want good value for their money, and neither side seems willing to give that.

Happy days are here again for the Republicans, or so you might think. Barack Obama’s popularity rating is sagging well below 50%. Passing health-care reform has done nothing to help him; most Americans believe he has wasted their money—and their view of how he is dealing with the economy is no less jaded. […] Sixty per cent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track.
[…]
The Republicans at the moment are less a party than an ongoing civil war (with, from a centrist point of view, the wrong side usually winning). There is a dwindling band of moderate Republicans who understand that they have to work with the Democrats in the interests of America. There is the old intolerant, gun-toting, immigrant-bashing, mainly southern right which sees any form of co-operation as treachery, even blasphemy. And muddying the whole picture is the tea-party movement, a tax revolt whose activists (some clever, some dotty, all angry) seem to loathe Bush-era free-spending Republicans as much as they hate Democrats. Egged on by a hysterical blogosphere and the ravings of Fox News blowhards, the Republican Party has turned upon itself.

On the night of Sunday, May 30, showing a terrifying disregard for human life, Israeli naval forces surrounded and boarded ships sailing to bring humanitarian aid to the blockaded Gaza Strip. On the largest ship, the Mavi Marmara, Israeli commandos opened fire on civilian passengers, killing at least 9 passengers and wounding dozens more. Others are still missing. The final death toll is yet to be determined. Cultures of Resistance director Iara Lee was aboard the besieged ship and has since returned home safely.

Despite the Israeli government’s thorough efforts to confiscate all footage taken during the attack, Iara Lee was able to retain some of her recordings. Above is 15 minutes of footage from the moments leading up to and during the Israeli commandos’ assault on the Mavi Marmara.


Hacker in the news. 10 reasons why Google is better than Bing.Another phony list. FCC looking over Apple practices. South Korea rocket blows up. Microsoft Office 2010 coming out soon and the company is worried? June 24 for iPhone 4. Sprint thinks its EVO can kill the iPhone? Motorola phone to get to 2 Ghz. Cheap Playstation in the works? MSFT Tech Ed show poorly planned.

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Fox News – June 9, 2010:

A small publishing company is under fire after putting warning labels on copies of the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence and other historical documents.

Wilder Publications warns readers of its reprints of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, Common Sense, the Articles of Confederation, and the Federalist Papers, among others, that “This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today.”

The disclaimer goes on to tell parents that they “might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read this classic work.”

The warning seems to be offending more people than the documents themselves.



 

Series Producer-Andrew McKinnon
This Episode’s Executive Producer: Rajdeep Dosanjh
Art by: Paul T.

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This is either a way for the public to screw the politicians who screwed them or for the public to get screwed harder once the big money figures out how to make this work for them. Either way, it’s change we can believe in!

The time for tinkering is done.

That was the message Californians sent when they voted Tuesday to radically rejigger elections in the nation’s most populous state. Under Proposition 14, a measure that easily passed, traditional party primaries will be replaced in 2011 with wide-open elections. The top two vote-getters — whatever their party, or if they have no party at all — will face off in the general election.

Supporters argue that without parties picking candidates for the general election, moderates and independents will move to the fore, and voters will pay more attention to the electoral process.

Critics of the measure say it will give a huge advantage to candidates who have the most money or the widest name recognition.

That no one actually knows what the real effect of Proposition 14 will be seems almost beside the point to frustrated voters. What mattered, supporters said, is that something fundamental about politics — anything fundamental — had been changed.

As supporters celebrated, they promised to bring the so-called “top two” system to a state near you, with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger leading the charge — though his second term, plagued by budget meltdowns and plunging popularity, was, analysts said, one of the leading motivators for the measure.




  • Google irked by Apple policies. Awww.
  • iPhone 3GS phones being discounted to dump them.
  • Sprint may be wrong about EVO sales. Who says? Sprint, that’s who! 
  • Google has new ideas in search. Code word: Caffeine.
  • Looks as if HP will keep the Palm Pre in play.
  • AMD new fusion chips are supposed to be great.
  • E3 buzz beginning.
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Apple has suffered another embarrassment. A security breach has exposed iPad owners including dozens of CEOs, military officials, and top politicians. They—and every other buyer of the cellular-enabled tablet—could be vulnerable to spam marketing and malicious hacking. The breach, which comes just weeks after an Apple employee lost an iPhone prototype in a bar, exposed the most exclusive email list on the planet, a collection of early-adopter iPad 3G subscribers that includes thousands of A-listers in finance, politics and media, from New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson to Diane Sawyer of ABC News to film mogul Harvey Weinstein to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It even appears that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s information was compromised.

It doesn’t stop there. According to the data we were given by the web security group that exploited vulnerabilities on the AT&T network, we believe 114,000 user accounts have been compromised, although it’s possible that confidential information about every iPad 3G owner in the U.S. has been exposed. We contacted Apple for comment but have yet to hear back. We also reached out to AT&T for comment. A call to Rahm Emanuel’s office at the White House has not been returned.

The specific information exposed in the breach included subscribers’ email addresses, coupled with an associated ID used to authenticate the subscriber on AT&T’s network, known as the ICC-ID. ICC-ID stands for integrated circuit card identifier and is used to identify the SIM cards that associate a mobile device with a particular subscriber. The subscriber data was obtained by a group calling itself Goatse Security. Though the group is steeped in off-the-wall, 4chan-style internet culture—its name is a reference to a famous gross-out Web picture—it has previously highlighted real security vulnerabilities in the Firefox and Safari Web browsers, and attracted media attention for finding what it said were flaws in Amazon’s community ratings system.

Har! Pwned by Goatse for cripes sake! Apple should have known nothing good can come out of a relationship with AT&T.


PASADENA, Calif. – Two new papers based on data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft scrutinize the complex chemical activity on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. While non-biological chemistry offers one possible explanation, some scientists believe these chemical signatures bolster the argument for a primitive, exotic form of life or precursor to life on Titan’s surface. According to one theory put forth by astrobiologists, the signatures fulfill two important conditions necessary for a hypothesized methane-based life.”

One key finding comes from a paper online now in the journal Icarus that shows hydrogen molecules flowing down through Titan’s atmosphere and disappearing at the surface. Another paper online now in the Journal of Geophysical Research maps hydrocarbons on the Titan surface and finds a lack of acetylene.

This lack of acetylene is important because that chemical would likely be the best energy source for a methane-based life on Titan, said Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., who proposed a set of conditions necessary for this kind of methane-based life on Titan in 2005. One interpretation of the acetylene data is that the hydrocarbon is being consumed as food. But McKay said the flow of hydrogen is even more critical because all of their proposed mechanisms involved the consumption of hydrogen.

Found by Misanthropic Scott.



Teenage girls are being taught how to walk in high heels in a government-funded college course in the UK.

The six-week Sexy Heels In The City course at London’s South Thames College costs 16-year-old students £150 ($268.02) and also gives lessons on how to carry designer handbags, the Daily Express newspaper reports.

The course claims to prepare young women “for the business world and their social lives”. “The earlier younger ladies learn how to walk in heels, the better it’s going to be in the long run – with business and social lives,” said former backing singer Chyna Whyne, who runs the course.

Taxpayers’ groups have slammed it as pointless and a waste of time.

“This is a silly gimmick. Training young people to get them back to work can be good value for money, but this is clearly a case of frivolity,” said Matthew Elliott from the TaxPayers’ Alliance.

Let’s hear it for more taxes…Yayyyyyyy!


The number of spills from offshore oil rigs and pipelines in U.S. waters more than quadrupled this decade, a trend that could have served as a warning for the massive leak in the Gulf of Mexico, according to government data and safety experts.

The spills — and the amount of oil that leaked — grew markedly worse even when taking increases in production into account, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data shows. The leaks came as the oil industry repeatedly claimed that offshore drilling was never safer.

The same Louisiana officials who now whine about government response to the BP oil spill being inadequate – led the march of political lemmings backing the Gulf drilling industry. They all got their slice of the contribution pie.

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