Diana Hsieh, a blogger in California, is being sued for suggesting that a link exists between Scie***logy and Front Sight, the largest firearms training facility in the country. Now another site is being threatened with legal action by Front Sight, because of negative comments posted by users on their message board. Light of Reason has some well-written entries about these events (search for “sci***ology” on their page).

Sci***ology can also be explored at David Touretzky’s site.” kuro5hin

Exposing myself to the wrath of the Scie***logists is one of the few things of which I’m truly afraid on the net, which is why (I hope) i’m cloaking myself from their searches with the asterisks. Their use of both recourse to legal relief and hacking tactics to cripple critics is well-established and nefarious. That being said, reading the material referenced above does not clearly make a direct link between Scie***logy and Front Sight, only that it is headed by someone who has taken courses with them. It is not clear that Scie***logy has directly initiated the lawsuits.

Dubya, Willya Turn the Book Over?: “That President Bush photo you keep getting in e-mail? The one where

he’s reading an upside-down book? Fake. No surprise. In fact, so many

Photoshopped shots are circulating that, one observer says, no real

photographs will exist in a few years. ” Wired

If you worry about the privacy and surveillance consequences of Internet cookies, auto toll transponders, supermarket chain “discount” cards, cell phone location tracking, etc., wait until you see Auto-ID Technology. Embedding ‘RFID Tag’ smart chips into everyday objects will allow them to be tracked by ubiquitous receivers linked to the Internet. Sure, shoplifting might become a thing of the past, but other implications are mindboggling. Start with the scenario depicted in Minority Report of stores recognizing returning customers with individualized sales and promotional strategies; go on to changing your health insurance rating because of the amount of alcohol or junkfood the database says you bought, or developing a risk profile based on the books and magazines you buy. What size database would the Carnivore or Echelon programs need to track five or six objects in the possession of every adult in the population to draw correlations that would allow continuous realtime tracking? I’m not enough of a computer wonk to know, but there are probably some of you out there who can do a back-of-the-envelope order-of-magnitude calculation. My guess is that it would indicate it is feasible.

“While doctors insist they aren’t influenced by the freebies that pharmaceutical companies routinely hand out, newly revealed internal memos from the drug company that paid a record fine for illegal marketing practices show that employees believed plying physicians with food and small gifts was a highly effective strategy in boosting drug sales“. Boston Globe

The New Club NATO — Thomas Friedman: ‘I wonder how many lady F-15 pilots the Latvians have. Actually, I wonder how many Denmark or Spain have. I suspect the number is zero. And that is the main reason why I don’t object anymore to NATO being expanded. Because, as we already saw in the Afghan war, most NATO countries have fallen so far behind the U.S. in their defense spending and modernizations, they really can’t fight alongside of us anymore anyway. So what the heck, let’s invite everybody in.

“It’s now Club NATO,” said Michael Mandelbaum, author of the new book The Ideas That Conquered the World. “And Club NATO’s main purpose seems to be to act as a kind of support group and kaffeeklatsch for the newly admitted democracies of Eastern and Central Europe, which suffered under authoritarian rule throughout the cold war.” ‘ NY Times op-ed

“Former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman has threatened a US journalist with legal action because he shares the same name as the musician.

The star’s lawyers have ordered the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter to “cease and desist” writing under his birth name.

They said he could only use it if he added a disclaimer to everything he wrote clearly indicating he is not the same Bill Wyman who was a member of the Rolling Stones.

The legal threat came after the reporter penned an article about old Rolling Stones albums for the newspaper as part of its coverage of the band’s tour date in Atlanta.

The journalist has suggested using the byline “Not That Bill Wyman”. But he claims to have more right to use the name than the band’s former bassist, who quit the band a decade ago.

The American Wyman was born in 1961, three years before the Rolling Stone changed his name from William George Perks to Bill Wyman.” Melbourne Herald Sun

A poignant selection of letters about the fear or, and struggle with, dementia from New York Times readers, in response to a feature on encroaching dementia.

Dubya, Willya Turn the Book Over?: “That President Bush photo you keep getting in e-mail? The one where

he’s reading an upside-down book? Fake. No surprise. In fact, so many

Photoshopped shots are circulating that, one observer says, no real

photographs will exist in a few years. ” Wired