doh!

CAMBRIDGE, England (AP) -- A museum visitor shattered three Qing dynasty Chinese vases when he tripped on his shoelace, stumbled down a stairway and brought the vases crashing to the floor, officials said Monday. - CNN

thank you google

As the Bush adminstration shows its despotic leanings yet another time, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo! have all given into the government requests for user search information to seek out how Americans find their porn on the internet. The short story is that the government wants to figure out how often porn comes up in searches and how many times it is searched for -- by looking at raw data. Never mind that robots and non-humans use the search engines as much as humans do and nullify any useful data, never mind that there's little that can be gained that can't be gained by looking at the publically accesible data that's already out there (Yahoo's buzz or Google's Zeitgeist -- and the broader numbers that I assume exist behind those pages -- for instance), no, the government truly wants to play the role of big brother yet again and intends to step on the privacy rights of individual Americans to do it. Big Brother knows best and is always benevolent, after all...

As everybody knows by now, Google is refusing to give in. They are respecting the rights of you and me and standing up to a government that is yet again stepping beyond the bounds of civil rights to control us all just a little bit more. Granted, it's good business and excellent publicity, but whatever their intentions I applaud Google and reinforce my intent to use them as my one and only search engine and provider of related web activities. I see no point in using any of the other three services again.

a sad ending

The whale that had wandered into the Thames River has died.

i guess whites are safe from hurricanes?

This from BET:

Concerned environmentalists say that unless the United States gets real about the threat of global warming, African Americans and other people of color can expect a repeat of disasters like Katrina.

Now, I understand that blacks are impacted by environmental tragedy, and maybe a little more in places like New Orleans where the poor, mostly black, neighborhoods are the more undesireable (like, easiest to flood)...but to say that "African Americans and other people of color" seems to exclude the fact that a lot of white people had their lives turned upside down by Katrina too. I don't know, maybe I'm tired...but I just have to say that this is offensive to me, at least in that it reminds me of how racism plays out, even in the black community. I mean, racism isn't going to end until people are bloody color-blind and we aren't even close when people like BET are still trying to play up black plight over white plight. A lot of people suffered a lot down there...

oh, sama

So Osama came out of hiding to say something today (hey, kinda like me!) and it was basically something like: Hey America, I know the public doesn't want the wars to continue and that you're only still there because of your warlord president and his gang.* I'm planning an attack, but let's have a truce.

Does anyone else find these words suspicious 12 days before the State of the Union Address...as if there was a plan to attack the president himself (from the claims to not blame most Americans but "the warlord"*) during the speech and then blame him for not taking up the truce that was offered as the ultimate "I told you so".

Maybe I'm just paranoid...Osama doesn't not carry out threats.

*Osama's words according to Al Jazeera

what is wrong with people?

Three homeless people were recently beaten by four young "men" in Fort Lauderdale recently...one of the homeless men died. I'm left speechless, especially after watching surveillience video of one of the attacks where the litle poseur assfreaks run off. I've reserved my wishes for life imprisonment with daily assrapings for very few in the past...but these four kids deserve a double dosage.

don't get excited...

..this isn't a real post, just one to let my regular readers know that I am not dead or anything. I just don't really feel like posting -- there's a lot going on in the world that I could be talking about, but nah...whatever.

Part of it is that I'm sort of down that I had to put my cat down on Tuesday. He had a tumor under his tongue that the vet said was more than likely cancer and untreatable and since he wasn't really able to drink much...I had to make the decision to euthanize before he started to slip. It was especially hard and draining because he was, at the time, behaving almost normally -- it killed me playing with him on Monday night knowing that it was going to be the last time. Fuck.

In any case, I probably won't write much this weekend either, so don't count on much. Maybe next week I'll be back in the mood. Who knows.

justice department okay's travesty, searches for rogue whistle-blower

Remember when someone in the Bush administration whispered to a few reporters that a certain wife of a certain critic of a certain war was a CIA agent? Remember how much the Bush administration fought against an investigation? Well, they're unleashing the hounds on the person that leaked the NSA program with lightning quickness.

Funny thing is, this leaker should be considered a minor hero -- someone who saw a blatently illegal action being taken and, though it be against the law to disclose top secret information to the press, did so.

An interesting note to this story that has come to light is that there was some opposition to the program by Justic Department officials, including none other than John Ashcroft himself. Now, given how huge a fascist asswipe Ashcroft is, the fact that he questioned the legality of the program should tell us all that there's a lot to be questioned here...