Thursday, December 3, 2009

A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.

You dump the piggy bank into CoinStar, and when you cash in the receipt, you get coins back! That's irriating, as the point of this exercise was to empty the piggy bank. But, if you just cycle the change back through the machine, all those coins just vaporize into service fees after less than 80 passes. (That is, assuming they round by truncating in their favor; if they round fairly, it stabilizes at 5¢ without a fee.) So that's no good, either. The trick is to cash in the bank when you have exactly the right amount to come out with an even-numbered cash-out. But that requires counting it first, which is something of a catch 22.

Previously, previously.

You are being lied to about pirates

In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply.

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the "pirates" have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a "tax" on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence".

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 064b!

That's right, I said 064b! I built and approximation of mixtape 064 out of Youtube videos, like I did for mixtape 047. Some entries on 064b have been replaced by other tracks by the same band, and a few are missing, because I couldn't find any videos...

Update, 19-Sep-2009: Youtube seems to have broken something. If the embedded player doesn't work, try this link.

Also, I have some Youtube hate:

• Dear Warner Music Group, please die in a fire.

• Dear nearly-every-record-label, why do you post all your videos with "embedding disabled"? All that does is make it so that I cannot include your videos in a playlist, and thus cannot promote your artists for you. It also doesn't really work, since I just have to go three pages deep in the search results to find someone else who posted a crappy television rip of it. Instead of your almost-as-crappy rip of it.

• Dear teenagers who post still-frame video as a way of sharing the audio: knock that shit off! There are real videos of all of these songs, and you're just cluttering up the damned search results.

• Dear Youtube: add some god damned options to your search engine, so I can search for only videos that are embeddable, and/or only videos that are high quality. (Bonus points if there's a checkbox for "videos that contain video"! Omit the ones where the frame rate is less than 1 FPS.)

  A checkbox for "leave out the ones where 80% of the audio is clipping" would be cool, too.

I just got this odd card in the mail:

Hand-written, sealed with wax, with a phone number and a web site written in light pencil on the back: jejuneinstitute.org.

It looks like The Dharma Initiative, and is apparently some kind of alternative-reality game.

But the real puzzle here is, this was sent to my home address, which isn't terribly easy to find. So which one of you ratted me out?

Dept. of Currency: Penny Dreadful

In November, 1989, Representatives James A. Hayes, of Louisiana, and Jim Kolbe, of Arizona, having had just about enough of all this, introduced the Price Rounding Act. Its purpose was to phase out the penny by requiring that all cash transactions be rounded to the nearest five cents. The bill was actively opposed by Americans for Common Cents, a lobbying organization that had been founded specifically to defeat the legislation. A.C.C.'s main funding came from Jarden Zinc Products, which is one of the nation's largest producers of zinc, and which has supplied the U.S. Mint with penny planchets since 1982. [...]

Coinstar charges most of its customers 8.9 per cent of any amount they feed into a machine. The fact that consumers happily pay this considerable fee suggests that they wouldn't be bothered by the vastly smaller penalty that rounding to the nearest nickel might entail. Of course, eliminating cents would also eliminate the middleman -- in this case Coinstar, which annually processes about forty billion coins, more than half of which are pennies. Not surprisingly, therefore, Coinstar has been an advocate of preserving pennies. Since 1998, the company has conducted an annual currency poll, which always shows that Americans still love pennies and would prefer to continue getting rid of them by collecting them for months or years and then paying Coinstar to put them back into circulation, instead of getting rid of them once and for all by having the Mint stop making them.

See also The Megapenny Project.

If you can't guess where lilmissnever works from this post, you're just not trying.

White House Missing Emails Were "Recycled"

Last night, in a midnight filing, the Bush adminstration admitted that it did not properly archive emails. But, that's not all --- they also admit to taping over the back-up tapes containing the email records. [...]

So, there was a system in place to archive emails, and the Bush administration simply stopped using it. Is there really any doubt that this is deliberately criminal activity? Those emails contain the details of the invasion of Iraq, the outing of Valerie Plame and the endangerement of our vital intelligence network, and the scheme to fire competent US Attorneys who refused to do their dirty work. [...]

And what about all of those RNC accounts the Bush officials were using? Remember those other "missing" emails? By Dana Perino's own admission there were at least 5 million missing.

You know that part that says "this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private"?

The pertinent portion of law is the Coinage Act of 1965, specifically Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled "Legal tender," which states: "United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues."

This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise. For example, a bus line may prohibit payment of fares in pennies or dollar bills. In addition, movie theaters, convenience stores and gas stations may refuse to accept large denomination currency (usually notes above $20) as a matter of policy.

It's shocking, really; if that part isn't true, how are we to believe the "in god we trust" part?

Senate Democrats Cave - Agree To Give Bush More Power To Spy On Americans Than Ever Before

But: OMG what a great photo.

Previously, previously, previously, ad nauseam.

Senate Backpedals On Legislation Requiring Paper Trail For E-Voting Machines

Democratic senators on Wednesday made another push for banning electronic voting machines that lack paper trails, but they've backed away from doing so in time for next year's presidential election.

Are they trying to say, "that's ok, we didn't expect to win anyway?"

And in almost equally WTF news,

California Republicans are pushing a ballot measure to divvy up the state's electoral votes by Congressional district in 2008. That could put the equivalent of Ohio back in play for the GOP, just in case one Ohio debacle wasn't enough.

I think the Electoral College system is pretty much bullshit, but come on: you can't change this shit one state at a time. It has to be simultaneous.

My National Security Letter Gag Order

Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.

Rather than turn over the information, I contacted lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, and in April 2004 I filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSL power. I never released the information the FBI sought, and last November the FBI decided that it no longer needs the information anyway. But the FBI still hasn't abandoned the gag order that prevents me from disclosing my experience and concerns with the law or the national security letter that was served on my company. In fact, the government will return to court in the next few weeks to defend the gag orders that are imposed on recipients of these letters.

Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case -- including the mere fact that I received an NSL -- from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.

I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.

I find it especially creepy that this guy's ACLU lawyers (apparently) advised him to lie when asked about the gag order instead of just saying "no comment". WTF?

Watch the Hacking Democracy democracy documentary playing on HBO this month. It's also available for download from Google video.

As documentaries go, it's not great -- they had about 40 minutes of material that they padded out to 80 minutes with long, lingering pans across rows of machines while the music swells -- but the content is important and infuriating.

Please watch this, because I'm constantly amazed at how many of my friends don't understand the problem with electronic voting machines, and don't know what I'm talking about when I bring this up in person. I've been posting links about this ongoing disaster for years, but I guess all of you are just here for the poop jokes.

Immigration arrests 15 aliens in Roswell working for U.S. military contractor.

Retroactive war crime protection drafted

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration drafted amendments to the War Crimes Act that would retroactively protect policymakers from possible criminal charges for authorizing any humiliating and degrading treatment of detainees, according to lawyers who have seen the proposal.

"I think what this bill can do is in effect immunize past crimes. That's why it's so dangerous," said attorney Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice. Fidell said the initiative is "not just protection of political appointees, but also CIA personnel who led interrogations."

Interrogation practices "follow from policies that were formed at the highest levels of the administration," said attorney Scott Horton, who has followed detainee issues closely. "The administration is trying to insulate policymakers under the War Crimes Act."

Larry Cox, Amnesty International USA's executive director, said that "President Bush is looking to limit the War Crimes Act through legislation" now that the Supreme Court has embraced Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. In June, the court ruled that Bush's plan to try Guantanamo Bay detainees in military tribunals violates Article 3.

Terra! Terra! Terra!

The alleged U.K. terror plot has been investigated for months by British intelligence, and the idea that the airliner attacks were planned for today seems to be nothing more than political fabrication and media hysteria.

Tony Blair and George W. Bush even planned the terror freakout in a series of phone calls that began last Friday and continued through the weekend. Blair and Bush put the finishing touches on their diabolical operation in a phone call early Wednesday, the Associated Press revealed today.

That's right: While millions of travelers are going through absolute hell today because of the sudden terror "news," it was last week when the U.S. president and U.K. prime minister began their cold calculations on how to get the maximum political benefit from the months-old investigation.

Wait, Aren't You Scared?

And now these guys. As the initial "OH SWEET MOTHER OF GOD THEY CAN BLOW US UP WITH SNAPPLE BOTTLES!!" hysteria subsides, we discover that these guys had been under surveillance, completely penetrated, by no less than three major intelligence agencies. That they were planning on cell phones, and some of them openly travelled to Pakistan (way to keep the cover, Reilly, Ace of Spies). Hell, Chertoff knew about this two weeks ago, and the only reason that some people can scream this headline:

"The London Bombers were within DAYS of trying a dry run!!!"

-- was because MI-5, MI-6, and Scotland Yard let them get that close, so they could suck in the largest number of contacts (again, very spiffy police work). The fact that these wingnuts could have been rolled up, at will, at any time, seems to have competely escaped the media buzz.

Interesting (long) analysis of NORAD's 9/11 transcript:

8:37:56
WATSON: What?
DOOLEY: Whoa!
WATSON: What was that?
ROUNTREE: Is that real-world?
DOOLEY: Real-world hijack.
WATSON: Cool!

For the first time in their careers, they'll get to put their training to full use.