The worst, is that the con was such a shoddy job. It is truly disheartening that so many, were played so well, by such stupid bald-faced lies.

Criminal trials of the perpetrators would certainly help to reduce the probability of a repetition in the near future. The Bush cabal seems to love severe punishment for lawless behavior, so let us indulge them.”

The Bush administration has previously said the convention which bans cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment does not apply to US personnel abroad.” (BBC)

Reports say the plane had experienced technical problems all morning, causing the take-off to be delayed for hours. Iranian media also say the pilot had asked twice to return to Mehrabad airport to make an emergency landing, but was refused because it was busy.” (BBC)

Limbo has long been held by the Catholic Church to be the place where the souls of children go if they die before they can be baptised, as well as the source of the chaotic neutral alignment and home of the Slaadi. However, a 30-strong international commission of theologians summoned by the late John Paul II last year to come up with a ‘more coherent and illuminating’ doctrine in tune with the modern age is to present its findings to Pope Benedict XVI on Friday.

Vatican sources said yesterday that the commission would recommend that Limbo be replaced by the more ‘compassionate’ doctrine that all children who die do so ‘in the hope of eternal salvation’, rather than the traditionally held belief that their souls suffer eternal deprivations at the hands of the Slaadi and their demented lords Ssendam and Ygorl.

What this change in theology will do for the millions of Dungeons & Dragons players across the world is not yet clear. Randy Thomson, a Dungeon Master of 23 years from Buffalo, New York, is livid. ‘The Pope has no authority to mess with the cosmology of our beloved multiverse!’ Thomson ranted, between gulps of cola. ‘This will be like Second Edition all over again, when they tried to take away our demons and devils. If it’s a schism the Pope wants, it’s a schism he’ll get!’

But not all players of the game are so enraged. Lisle Sheffield, a player for 14 years from Tucson, Arizona, said, ‘Frankly, I’m pleased with this move. The planar cosmology was a straitjacket imposed by the medieval-style beliefs of roleplayers from the 1970s, who saw the need for a way to restrain the actions of characters within a rigid alignment system. In these enlightened times, such measures are not necessary, as modern secular humanism encourages accountability for actions within the moral framework of the D&D setting without the need for rules. I see the abolition of Limbo as the first step towards a more open and honest roleplaying system.’

These arguments don’t go down well with Timmy Livingstone, a 14-year-old from Sacramento, Caifornia, who discovered the game with his friends last summer. ‘The Pope can’t take away Limbo! Who does he think he is! My 78th level half-elf-half-dwarf paladin-ranger-barbarian just got a 23 sword of Slaad-slaying, and was going to go to Limbo and kill Ygorl and take over the whole plane! How’s he going to do that now? He might have to take over the Seven Heavens instead! Let’s see how the Pope likes that!’

The Vatican has so far declined to comment on the reactions of the faithful D&D players of the world.” (dmmaus via walker)

There are things which make sense in the context of a first term, a presidential campaign, a major policy to sell, or if there is an heir apparent (like Gore in 2000). But basically either people are happy with the economy or not and no speechifying by Bush is going to change their minds

I thought the same thing and then realized that he was just repeating his stump speech, slightly updated. (He even had the usual applause lines — tort reform! YEAHHHHHHHHH!) I should have known what was going on when he mentioned ‘his opponent’ in a speech a couple of weeks ago.

Bush is running for president again. It’s really the only thing he knows how to do successfully. (And even then, only 50% of the time.) This time he’s running against himself — Bush the 35% loser.

Talk about the lesser of two evils.” (digby)

‘There’s a whole range of biblical scriptures simply bursting with eroticism,’ said Stefan Wiest, the 32-year-old photographer who took the titillating pictures.” (Yahoo! News)

In doing so, Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin, has turned the tables on the media, who ultimately fought a losing battle to protect Rove – their source – who revealed to some reporters Plame Wilson’s identity and CIA status.

Now Luskin has fired back, revealing to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that Viveca Novak – a reporter working for Time magazine who wrote several stories about the Plame case – inadvertently tipped him off last year that her colleague at the magazine would be forced to testify that Rove was his source who told him about Plame Wilson’s CIA status, several people close to the case said this week.

The latest twist in the two-year-old investigation has all the elements of a Hollywood thriller. New details in the case seem to emerge on a daily basis. Selective leaks to a small handful of newspapers and cable news stations are aimed at portraying some of the key Bush administration officials involved in the case in a sympathetic light, while casting Fitzgerald as a partisan prosecutor.” (truthout)

For doctors, understanding and figuring out how to respond to an individual patient’s perspective – continue to fight for life when chances of survival are slim, or acquiesce and try to make the best of whatever time remains? – can be almost as grave a responsibility as the more scientific challenge of treating disease. In trying to come to terms with my mother’s death, I wanted to understand the work of the oncologists who treated her and what treating her meant to them, both humanly and scientifically. What chance was there really of translating a patient’s hope for survival into the reality of a cure? One common thread in what they told me was that interpreting a patient’s wishes is as much art as science.” (New York Times Magazine)

To defeat wiretapping systems, the target need only send the same "idle signal" that the tapping equipment sends to the recorder when the telephone is not in use. The target could continue to have a conversation while sending the forged signal.

The tone, also known as a C-tone, sounds like a low buzzing and is "slightly annoying but would not affect the voice quality" of the call, Mr. Blaze said, adding, "It turns the recorder right off."

The paper can be found at <a href=”http://www.crypto.com/papers/wiretapping&#8221; title=”

The paper can be found at”>http://www.crypto.com/papers/wiretapping.” (New York Times thanks to walker)

An abject coward, that endorses violence by others. A voice straining to resurrect McCarthy, he of the politically motivated faux hunt for witches and demons, the closest thing this country has to a He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named outside of the Harry Potter universe. A face twisted into unimaginable hate, with talk of the traitorousness of her perceived enemies, all of them better Americans than she can even momentarily pretend to be.

That such transparent propaganda, wrapped with such venom for her fellow Americans, could exist is hardly surprising. But those that publish her words should be branded with them. Those that give her a voice should be remembered for what they are, as surely as she herself.”

…In 2002, only 9 percent of adults were able to say that the children they saw in public were ‘respectful toward adults,’ according to surveys done then by Public Agenda, a nonpartisan and nonprofit public opinion research group. In 2004, more than one in three teachers told Public Agenda pollsters they had seriously considered leaving their profession or knew a colleague who had left because of ‘intolerable’ student behavior.” (New York Times )

It’s a strategy that appears to be working, at least so far. While Newsweek, which was given an exclusive look at the rough cut of the movie, says that Lion is ‘only as Christian as you want it to be,’ Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, describes it as a ‘tool that many may find effective in communicating the message of Jesus to those who may not respond to other presentations.'” (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

The 38-year-old woman, who wants to remain anonymous, had a nose, lips and chin grafted onto her face from a brain-dead donor whose family gave consent. ” (Yahoo! News)

‘Insulin disappears early and dramatically in Alzheimer’s disease,’ senior researcher Suzanne M. de la Monte, a neuropathologist at Rhode Island Hospital and a professor of pathology at Brown University Medical School, said in a prepared statement.

‘And many of the unexplained features of Alzheimer’s, such as cell death and tangles in the brain, appear to be linked to abnormalities in insulin signaling. This demonstrates that the disease is most likely a neuroendocrine disorder, or another type of diabetes,’ she added.

The discovery that the brain produces insulin at all is a recent one, and de la Monte’s group also found that brain insulin produced by patients with Alzheimer’s disease tends to fall below normal levels.

Now her group has discovered that brain levels of insulin and its related cellular receptors fall precipitously during the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Insulin levels continue to drop progressively as the disease becomes more severe — adding to evidence that Alzheimer’s might be a new form of diabetes, she said.

In addition, the Brown University team found that low levels of acetylcholine — a hallmark of Alzheimer’s — are directly linked to this loss of insulin and insulin-like growth factor function in the brain.” (Yahoo! News)

…[But] while Western researchers are exploring the effects of meditation on physical health, Alan Wallace, a leading Tibetan scholar and one of the Dalai Lama’s translators, pointed out that when faced with physical ailments, Tibetans traditionally turned to doctors or healers, not to meditation.

The purpose of meditation, added the Dalai Lama, is not to cure physical ailments, but to free people from emotional suffering.”

And while such doctors have always been part of medicine, medical organizations say they fear that they are increasingly common – doctors, under pressure to see more patients, are spending less and less time with each one and are replacing long discussions with laboratory tests and scans – and that most problem doctors apparently have no idea of their patients’ opinions of them.” (New York Times )

In response, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials have proposed new federal regulations to electronically track more than 600 million U.S. airline passengers a year traveling on more than 7 million flights through 67 hub airports.

The new regulations, which are available on the CDC’s Web site and will be posted for a 60-day comment period in the Federal Register starting Nov. 30, would require airlines, travel agents and global reservations systems to collect personal information that exceeds the quantity of information currently collected by the Transportation Security Administration or the Homeland Security Department.” (Gov’tHealth IT)

Opus Dei was founded in Spain in 1928; today, it has 84,000 members in 80 countries. For many, the group first gained wide attention when it was portrayed in Dan Brown’s best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code. The thriller depicted the group as a repository for arcane knowledge and fervent — even dangerous — belief.

Vatican reporter John Allen’s new book is Opus Dei: An Objective Look Behind the Myths and Reality of the Most Controversial Force in the Catholic Church. The book is being billed as the first serious journalistic investigation of the highly secretive organization. Allen writes for the National Catholic Reporter; he is also a Vatican analyst for CNN and NPR.” (NPR: Fresh Air)

“I tried to tell him,” the former senior official said. “And he couldn’t hear it.”’

Few people have ever seen a Venus shadow. But they’re there, elusive and delicate—and, if you appreciate rare things, a thrill to witness.

Attention, thrill-seekers: Venus is reaching its peak brightness for 2005 and casting its very best shadows right now.” (NASA)

As used by its proponents, the phrase currently refers to one or more of the below :

* a transition of websites from isolated information silos to sources of content and functionality, thus becoming a computing platform serving web applications to end users
* a social phenomenon referring to an approach to creating and distributing Web content itself, characterised by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share and re-use, and “the market as a conversation”
* a more organized and categorized content, with a more developed deeplinking web architecture.
* a shift in economic value of the web, potentially equalling that of the dot com boom of the late 1990s

However, a consensus upon its exact meaning has not yet been reached. Skeptics argue that the term is essentially meaningless, or that it means whatever its proponents decide that they want it to mean in order to convince the media and investors that they are creating something fundamentally new, rather than continuing to develop and use well-established technologies.

Many recently developed concepts and technologies are seen as contributing to Web 2.0, including weblogs, wikis, podcasts, rss feeds and other forms of many to many publishing; social software, web APIs, web standards, online web services, AJAX, and others.

The concept is different from Web 1.0, as it is a move away from websites, email, using search engines and surfing from one website to the next. Others are more skeptical that such basic concepts can be superceded in any real way by those listed above.”

Williams, 51, faces a lethal injection on Dec. 13 for the 1979 slayings of a Whittier convenience store clerk and three people at a Pico Rivera motel. He has maintained his innocence and has asked the California Supreme Court to reopen his case, alleging shoddy forensics wrongly connected him to three of the murders. The Supreme Court hasn’t ruled on the petition.

Two other clemency petitions have come before Schwarzenegger. Neither was granted.” (Yahoo! News)

The man started arguing with people inside the store, WFTV-TV in Orlando reported. He then started fighting with the guards, the station reported…” (Yahoo! News)

‘I wish Bush would be (coherent, eschewed) for once during a speech, but there are theories that his everyday diction charms the below-average mind, hence insuring him Republican votes,’ said one question on a quiz written by English and social studies teacher Bret Chenkin.” (HuffPo via Friends of Elvis)

The oceans will rise nearly half a metre by the end of the century, forcing coastlines back by hundreds of metres, the researchers claim. Scientists believe the acceleration is caused mainly by the surge in greenhouse gas emissions produced by the development of industry and introduction of fossil fuel burning.” (Guardian.UK)

Mr Padilla, a US citizen who had been held for more than three years as an ‘enemy combatant’ in a military prison in North Carolina, was indicted on Tuesday on the lesser charges of supporting terrorism abroad.” (Guardian.UK)

…The hallmark of the Dick Cheney administration is its illegitimacy. Its essential method is bypassing established lines of authority; its goal is the concentration of unaccountable presidential power. When it matters, the regular operations of the CIA, Defense Department and State Department have been sidelined.

Richard Nixon is the model, but with modifications. In the Nixon administration, the president was the prime mover, present at the creation of his own options, attentive to detail, and conscious of their consequences. In the Cheney administration, the president is volatile but passive, firm but malleable, presiding but absent. Once his complicity has been arranged, a closely held ‘cabal’ — as Lawrence Wilkerson, once chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, calls it — wields control.” — Sidney Blumenthal (Salon)

…We live in a society where it’s increasingly difficult to differentiate between adults and kids. Go to a mall, squint your eyes, and see if you can tell the difference between the alarming 18-year-olds who seem 35 and the much more alarming 35-year-olds trying to pass for 18. A case can be made that recognizing adult ADD isn’t so much an enlightened leap in Western medicine as a questionable evolution in a culture that recently welcomed the dubious word ‘adultescent’ into the 2005 edition of Webster’s New World College Dictionary. ” (Salon)

…”I’m doing a lot of good work with some great clients,” Brown said. “My wife, children and my grandchild still love me. My parents are still proud of me.”” (Yahoo! News)

Such a stunt, a mainstay of the office party, often results in cracked glass on the copier, with 32 percent of Canon technicians claiming to have been called out to fix glass plates during the Christmas period after attempts to copy body parts went wrong. Tim Andrews, a Canon employee from London, said: ‘We always fit lots of new glass to copiers after New Year due to ‘rear-end copying.” In fact, Canon claims a shocking 46 percent of service calls are in response to non-work-related breakages.

…Partly in response to this trend–or perhaps because of the ‘supersizing’ of the western physique–Canon has now increased the thickness of its glass by an extra millimeter.” (CNET [via walker])

Researchers found that when they gave acetaminophen to nursing home patients who had moderate to severe dementia, the medication helped changed some of the patients’ behaviors. They tended, for example, to spend less time in their rooms and more time watching television, listening to music, reading or performing ‘work-like’ activities.

The findings suggest that unrecognized, untreated pain in dementia patients keeps them from being as active as they can be, according to the study authors, led by Dr. John T. Chibnall of the Saint Louis University School of Medicine in Missouri.” (Yahoo! News)

Republicans used to inveigh against the Democrats as the party of ‘Rum, Romanism and Rebellion,’ but now Bacardi has the GOP in its pocket, it symbolizes the complete turnaround of political positions.” — Ian Williams, author of Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776 (The Nation)

…The new version will not be placed in the original setting, the north Wales village of Portmeirion, or have the arty, ‘pop’ feel of the original, according to the magazine Broadcast. Damien Timmer, who has been lined up to executive produce the show, told the television and radio industry magazine that the new series ‘takes liberties with the original’. He said: ‘Although it will be a radical reinvention, it will still be a heightened show with themes such as paranoia, conspiracy and identity crisis.’

The original show, which ran on ITV for 17 episodes, has been the subject of university courses.” (This is London [via walker])

Rendez-vous: the psychoanalysis of Francois Mitterrand , by Ali Magoudi, who met the late French president up to twice a week in secrecy at his Paris practice from 1982 to 1984, also reveals that Mr Mitterrand believed he would get his ‘revenge’ by building a tunnel under the Channel that would forever destroy Britain’s island status.” (The Age [via the null device] )

Human rights groups, such as Cultural Survival, First Peoples Worldwide, EarthRights International, Survival International, and the Forest Peoples Programme argue the opposite, accusing some of the BINGOs and governments like Uganda’s of destroying indigenous cultures, the diversity of which they deem essential to the preservation of biological diversity.” (Orion)

That’s what the great journalist I.F. Stone was driving at when he wrote, a few years into the Vietnam War, in mid-February 1968: ‘It is time to stand back and look at where we are going. And to take a good look at ourselves. A first observation is that we can easily overestimate our national conscience. A major part of the protest against the war springs simply from the fact that we are losing it. If it were not for the heavy cost, politicians like the Kennedys [Robert and Edward] and organizations like ADA [the liberal Americans for Democratic Action] would still be as complacent about the war as they were a few years ago.'” (truthout)

Applying a piece of opaque tape to the outer edge of the disk renders the data track of the CD unreadable. A computer trying to play the CD will then skip to the music without accessing the bundled DRM technology.

‘After more than five years of trying, the recording industry has not yet demonstrated a workable DRM scheme for music CDs,’ Gartner concluded in a newly published research note.

The use of a piece of tape will defeat any future DRM system on audio CDs designed to be played on a stand-alone CD player, the analyst said.” (vnunet.com)

In my version of the fantasy, I take Bush to the Dongyue temple in Beijing, China, for a little fire and brimstone, Taoist style. In small halls off the courtyard of this imposing place of worship, brightly-colored, hero-sized gods preside over the 76 departments of hell. Near-life-sized sinners carved out of wood suffer appropriate punishments, the saintly reap blessings, and hell’s bureaucrats record every detail. All this is explicitly narrated on stainless steel panels bolted to each hall.

Hell doesn’t have 76 departments for nothing; it’s enough to make anyone feel that each transgression and act of kindness, great and small, makes an indelible mark on the soul.” — Morgon Mae Schultz (Utne Reader)

Their report on what is known as ‘mental state decoding’ – or identifying other people’s emotional states from social cues such as eye expressions – is published today in the international journal, Cognition and Emotion.

Previous related research by the Queen’s investigators has been conducted on people diagnosed with clinical depression. In this case, the clinically depressed participants performed much worse on tests of mental state decoding than people who weren’t depressed.

To explain the apparent discrepancy between those with mild and clinical depression, the researchers suggest that becoming mildly depressed (dysphoric) can heighten concern about your surroundings. ‘People with mild levels of depression may initially experience feelings of helplessness, and a desire to regain control of their social world,’ says Dr. Harkness. ‘They might be specially motivated to scan their environment in a very detailed way, to find subtle social cues indicating what others are thinking and feeling.'” (EurekAlert!)

The new TMT (Thirty-Meter Telescope) will be the first of a new generation of massive Earth-based telescopes that will far eclipse today’s largest observatories. The TMT scope will be so large, it will be housed in an observatory the size of a football stadium resembling an eyeball. The TMT project will be the first realization of a new breed of super-scopes, known as Giant Segmented Mirror Telescopes. The National Academy of Sciences, in a report called ‘Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium,’ said these scopes are the top priority for ground-based astronomy…. Although a site has yet to be chosen for the behemoth, the higher elevations of Hawaii or Chile are under consideration. ” (Wired News)

…An exterminator shot the sparrow Monday in the northern city of Leeuwarden after fears the bird could upset more of the 4 million dominoes which staff had spent weeks balancing on their edges for the record attempt.” (Reuters)

Researchers took the gene for a protein capable of killing pea weevil pests from the common bean and transferred it into the pea. When extracted from the bean, this protein does not cause an allergic reaction in mice or people. But when the protein is expressed in the pea, its structure is subtly different to the original in the bean. This structural change probably caused the unexpected immune effects. The researchers are calling for improvements in screening requirements for genetically engineered plants.” (New Scientist )

Tested in Russia, the two-stage GK-1 voice analyzer requires that passengers don headphones at a console and answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ into a microphone to questions about whether they are planning something illicit.

The software will almost always pick up uncontrollable tremors in the voice that give away liars or those with something to hide, say its designers at Israeli firm Nemesysco.” (CNET)

The VHE is dedicated to phasing out the human race in the interest of the health of the Earth, founder Les Knight told Wednesday’s San Francisco Chronicle.

With 16,000 people born per hour and a current global population of 6.5 billion, there are already more than enough people on the planet, Knight said.

A 1994 study concluded a single person born in the 1990s would be responsible during a lifetime for 22 million pounds of liquid waste and 2.2 million pounds each of solid waste and atmospheric waste, the newspaper said. He or she will have a lifetime consumption of 4,000 barrels of oil, 1.5 million pounds of minerals and 62,000 pounds of animal products that will necessitate the slaughter of 2,000 animals.

‘Wherever humans live, not much else lives,’ Knight said. ‘It isn’t that we’re evil and want to kill everything — it’s just how we live.'”

Waiting like a ship in the night for a quick, opportunistic vote is a Republican proposal that could devastate existing campaign controls by allowing politicians to collude with big-check donors from corporations, unions and lobbying blocs to finance unlimited amounts of campaign ads on the Internet. This would signal the return to unregulated soft-money politicking that a wiser and warier Congress outlawed three years ago.” (New York Times editorial)

Katherine Harris, then Florida’s secretary of state — and now a member of the U.S. House of Representatives — ordered a study in which, according to an article by Jim Stratton in the Orlando Sentinel, ‘researchers worked with a rabbi and a cardiologist to test ‘Celestial Drops,’ promoted as a canker inhibitor because of its ‘improved fractal design,’ ‘infinite levels of order,’ and ‘high energy and low entropy.”” (MSMBC)