Shouting Grounds

Drummed for the likes of !!! (chk chk chk) and LCD Soundsystem, and is now no more.

From The London Telegraph by way of ThinkProgress.org:

Maj Gen Taguba, who retired in January 2007, said he supported the President’s decision, adding: “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency. [...]

Among the graphic statements…is that of Kasim Mehaddi Hilas in which he says: “I saw [name of a translator] ******* a kid, his age would be about 15 to 18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn’t covered and I saw [name] who was wearing the military uniform, putting his **** in the little kid’s ***…. and the female soldier was taking pictures.” [...]

Three detainees, including the alleged victim, refer to the use of a phosphorescent tube in the sexual abuse and another to the use of wire, while the victim also refers to part of a policeman’s “stick” all of which were apparently photographed.

Now the “kid” in the above example was male, as was the translator who was allegedly busting up his bowels.

Also from The Daily Beast:

A senior military officer familiar with the photos told me that they would likely provoke a storm of outrage if released. … Some show U.S. personnel engaged in sexual acts with prisoners and each other. In one, a female prisoner appears to have been forced to expose her breasts to be photographed. In another, a prisoner is suspended naked upside down from the top bunk of a bed in a stress position. [...]

Still other withheld photographs have been circulating among U.S. soldiers who served in Iraq. One soldier showed them to me, including a photograph in which a male in a U.S. military uniform receives oral sex from a female prisoner.

So the decision that Barack made to block the release of these photos is a little more justified. No matter how many “My Bad”’s you issue after revealing that your government condoned and permitted sexual assault on male and female (sometimes underage) detainees in your charge, you are going to have a tough time “focusing on the future” without answering calls to prosecute military and CIA personnel and also civilian contractors. I really don’t think that there’s any way around prosecutions and further investigations, because I think that there isn’t way to ignore this any further. I read a story yesterday that said essentially Maliki was briefed on these photos and stated, “Bagdad will burn” if the world were to see these images. Releasing the photos without any actions taken to apprehend or answer to the crimes these images depict would probably rush the United States out of the region much sooner than planned, for good or for ill. The longer Obama hesitates to sort out these crimes and bring perpetrators/planners/instigators to justice the more he is complicit in the coverup.

by: Jerry Fletcher
April 9, 2009 – Chicago, Ill

The US Navy hopes that a peaceful resolution is at hand hundreds of miles off of the Somali Coast.

Early Wednesday the U.S.-flagged cargo ship, Maersk Alabama, was approached by a small watercraft containing several Somalian nationals who had become stranded over 350 nautical miles east of the Horn of Africa. The 20-person All American crew of the Alabama tied up the small boat and brought the Somalians on board the super-cargo ship.

A witness on the Alabama said that the stranded peoples were showing signs of malnourishment and dehydration, and also that they “seemed more primitive” than he would have expected for people that had found themselves in such a situation.

In accordance with United States Maritime Law, the crew of the Alabama tended to the Somalians and immediately began their exposure to the “American Dream”. Luckily, Maersk Line Ltd. out of Norfolk, Va., requires that all of their cargo ships sail equipped with proper training materials for such situations. The witness, who prefers not to be named, said that while the Somalians happily sat through the first two presentations, “Capitalism Today” and “Tale of a Good Consumer”, then showing signs of the Fear once they had eaten through their provisions and the crew began showing “The American Way: Jesus Christ our Savior”.

“They were surely grateful to have been rescued, but didn’t seem willing to accept the American Dream as they should have,” the witness stated.

In accordance with Maritime Law, the executive officer of the Maersk Alabama distributed handguns and automatic rifles to their crew to help in convincing their guests that the only right way was American way. The ship’s Captain, Richard “Trick Dick” Phillips, reportedly didn’t agree with his XO’s representation of Maritime Law, and took issue with the escalation of the situation. The executive officer swiftly diffused the situation by removing Captain Phillips from command and subjecting him to the same treatment afforded, as the witness referred to them as, the “skinnies”.

The witness couldn’t recall how but the Somalians were able to overpower the crew, steal their weapons and lock them in the ship’s steering maintenance compartment, along with one of their own people…the only one who appeared willing to understand the American videos.

“One of the savages subdued me with an alarmingly large tube of real Wisconsin Summer Sausage…when I regained consciousness my mates and I were locked in the [steering bay],” the witness struggled to recall.

Luckily, a member of the crew was able to signal the nearest U.S. Navy ship before being sequestered to the maintenance compartment. The USS Bainbridge, a Navy Morale and Resupply cruiser, was quickly able to track down the Alabama and intercede.

Wanting nothing to do with the ship itself or her payload, described by the witness as “convenience toiletries, nondescript plastic junk, and supplies for the U.S. Christian charities of WorldVision and Catholic Relief Services”, the Somalians were able to coerce Captain Phillips into helping them flee using one of the Alabama’s lifeboats. The escaping boat wasn’t able to get far before being intercepted by the Bainbridge. U.S. Naval personnel were able to quickly free the crew of the Alabama, restore their command of the cargo ship and allow them to continue on toward their middle eastern destination with their cargo.

Captain Phillips has been in communications with the Bainbridge, claiming that he “really doesn’t care for the three C’s anymore,” alarmingly referring to Consumerism, Catholosism and Conquest…the cornerstones of modern America. Captain O’Rly of the Bainbridge has attempted to diffuse the situation in the “only way he knows how”

“Luckily we were the closest vessel, being a [Morale and Resupply] ship. I reckon we had the most convincing weapon at our disposal…the blinding righteousness of American-made consumer products,” Captain O’Rly said.

The Bainbridge started by lobbing plastic bottles of Mountain Dew Code Red soda, King Size Snickers candy bars and bags of Xtreme Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in the vicinity of the lifeboat while projecting reruns of American Idol through its windows. With no obvious effect, Captain O’Rly has been reluctant to use escalated force since the arrival of the Marine Nationale (France) “intelligence” ship, the Dupuy de Lôme. The U.S. Navy hopes to avoid what could be construed by the French as an overtly-hostile act in the name of the American Dream.

The U.S. Navy is now considering this as a hostage situation, and the Bainbridge awaits the arrival of negotiators from the F.B.I., who can hopefully return peace and American prosperity to the Middle East.

With 12 apps being offered for $39.99, you can’t beat the deal and with 25% of all orders going to charity you can even rationalize your purchase as being a gift to those less fortunate. Win-Win

I’ll talk about one of the major apps in the list that caught my eye.

Kinemac, the 3D motion graphics application, tops the app list as far as retail value ($299). If you’re a Mac user with at least a marginal amount of interest in media production, I would say based on its inclusion you would be hard pressed to find a reason not to buy this bundle. While it doesn’t quite measure up to apps like Apple’s Motion or Adobe’s AfterEffects in the realm of features, it’s certainly intuitive and easy on the eyes.

Some of the more powerful features in Kinemac include being able able to drag damn-near any image type to any surface for mapping. You can map not only 2d raster images but text, 2d vector (svg), and video files as well! If you don’t fancy building your own models using the limited primitives (sphere, cube, cone, cylinder, ring, star, 3D text, etc) provided in-app, you can drag over 3D obj and 3ds files made using other 3D modeling software. All of these features are implemented in realtime so you get a machine-specific representation (I’ll touch on this in a moment) of your animation immediately without rendering. Key framing is full featured with full bezier editing via a timeline. You can add backgrounds with alpha to export Final Cut compatible exports for video overlays.

Now the hiccup:
Some things I noticed about Kinemac that concern me are the fact that your export options are limited by your graphics hardware (another reason to pony up for Pro’s verses standard macbooks), shadows as a result of lighting are seemingly unsupported (unless you’re talking about text effect shadows), and 3d modeling (as far as creating, forming, and exporting your own meshes) is not supported.

Using an Intel graphics chipset means that you don’t have support for anti-aliased exports of your projects (kinda weak), it also limits (possibly removing) your motion blur options. Even on my Dual G5 with an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro motion blur export controls are disabled, though I can add anti-aliasing (yay). The lack of shadows made me pause, because it seems like such a no-brainer to include, but technically since this software does everything in real-time it is limited in what it can represent without a proper ray tracing engine. We all know that real-time shadows as seen in video games are generally of poor quality (see cheating) so perhaps this is why they didn’t bother to include this as a feature. Finally the copy of Kinemac that you purchase is tied (via hardware signature/online activation) to a single workstation. A pretty inflexible arrangement in this day and age of extreme workstation mobility to be sure, but hell, why not buy to bundles? You will still be saving tons of money.

Running at a fraction of your $39 investment you will certainly get tons of use out of Kinemac despite any technical hang-ups you may notice. If you’re a mac user, I suggest taking the plunge.

Here’s a list of the other apps being offered (and some that will be unlocked as more buyers commit).

Per BBC News:

The object, known as 2009 DD45, thought to be 21-47m (68-152ft) across, raced by our planet at 1344 GMT on Monday.
The gap was just 72,000 km (44,750 miles); a fifth of the distance between our planet and the Moon.

Considering the name of the object, the absolute earliest we’ve known about it would have been January 1st of this year. Three months time is a very small window before a potential impact with an object “68-152ft across”. Enough mass to annihilate many cities (and some states) and significantly alter the landscape of our Earth. We would only have had, a most, three months to prepare for its arrival. This doesn’t fill me with too much confidence that any known method of altering the trajectory of threatening space debris would do the least bit of good. I’m not saying that we are prepared for a “Armageddon” style interception of any kind, but it is a sobering report to say the least. I hope that people eventually realize that we have to start making more substantive efforts towards protecting our planet from the possibility of a calamitous impact from space.

At this point in our understanding of these objects would authorities on the subject even bother to predict where such an object (or larger) would strike? Would such information do more harm, in terms of widespread panic, than good, considering we are in no way prepared to prevent it and we would have potentially so little time to evacuate? Would the response be to quietly shuffle support structures into place to prepare for the aftermath? I would hope that we would risk panic to save more lives, but who knows?

I took some screen shots of the disaster as it was unfolding. Kinda sucks that the definitive source for live Apple news from within Macworld was harrassed in such a manner. As of 11:40am CST macrumors.com is still down.

After this last screenshot the site was pulled, most likely by macrumors’ staff to deal with the security issue and prevent any further malicious disinformation.

From Wired:

Amero, a substitute teacher in Norwich, Connecticut, was arrested after students in her class reported that they’d seen pornographic images on her computer screen on Oct. 19, 2004. Amero said the computer wouldn’t stop sending pop-ups and that she didn’t know what to do with the computer.
In January 2007, she was convicted of four felony pornography charges and faced up to 40 years in prison.

This is totally fucked up. Can you image going to jail for possibly 40 years because of shitty ass Windows and Internet Explorer’s vulnerabilities. Thank fuck that the judge ordered a new trial. Still being charged with even a misdemeanor is ridiculous considering it wasn’t even her computer. Another reason why you’d have to be insane to be a teacher these days. Low pay, insane lawsuits, crazy parents, lying/disrespectful children, and the inability to kick anyone’s ass. I actually feel bad for Wally these days. To think where I’d be if I’d have turned “Doom Off!”

From the New York Times Online:

The Bristol University statement said a segment of trachea, roughly three inches long, was taken from a 51-year-old donor who had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Using a new technique developed in Padua University, the trachea was stripped of its donor’s cells over a six-week period “so that no donor cells remained,” the statement said.

At the same time, at Bristol University, stem cells removed from Ms. Castillo’s bone marrow, were grown into “a large population” and used to “seed” the donated windpipe using a new technique developed in Milan to incubate cells.

Can you only imagine what breakthroughs could have come about if the Bush administration wasn’t living in the dark ages? Although still needing to rely on 3rd-party donor tissue is a bit of a limitation. I wonder if they will find a way to grow organ tissue without the need for a destructive harvest of a host organ.

From projectcensored.org 25 articles that beg repeating:

#1. Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation
# 2 Security and Prosperity Partnership: Militarized NAFTA
# 3 InfraGard: The FBI Deputizes Business
# 4 ILEA: Is the US Restarting Dirty Wars in Latin America?
# 5 Seizing War Protesters’ Assets
# 6 The Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act
# 7 Guest Workers Inc.: Fraud and Human Trafficking
# 8 Executive Orders Can Be Changed Secretly
#9 Iraq and Afghanistan Vets Testify
# 10 APA Complicit in CIA Torture
# 11 El Salvador’s Water Privatization and the Global War on Terror
# 12 Bush Profiteers Collect Billions From No Child Left Behind
# 13 Tracking Billions of Dollars Lost in Iraq
# 14 Mainstreaming Nuclear Waste
# 15 Worldwide Slavery
# 16 Annual Survey on Trade Union Rights
# 17 UN’s Empty Declaration of Indigenous Rights
# 18 Cruelty and Death in Juvenile Detention Centers
# 19 Indigenous Herders and Small Farmers Fight Livestock Extinction
# 20 Marijuana Arrests Set New Record
# 21 NATO Considers “First Strike” Nuclear Option
# 22 CARE Rejects US Food Aid
# 23 FDA Complicit in Pushing Pharmaceutical Drugs
# 24 Japan Questions 9/11 and the Global War on Terror
# 25 Bush’s Real Problem with Eliot Spitzer

This is totally fucked considering I’ve thrown out my fair share of CRT’s, and we all know one man who cracked and burned his fair share…

Watch CBS Videos Online

Everyone knew that Sarah Palin was a fucking moron and had no business anywhere near the goddamn White House, but they kept it all a under their hats the best they could instead of thinking of “America First” like they continually claimed the Democrats weren’t doing.

Why isn’t everyone sharpening their pitch forks and grilling these criminals over their attempts to put the United States at a strategic disadvantage? One could go as far to say that it could be constituted as wreckless endangerment. It’s truly obscene the lengths at which the Republican party will go in order to hold onto the reigns of power.

The bitch didn’t know that Africa is a continent not a country!! And Fox News knew about this all a fucking LONG!!!

From TalkingPointsMemo.com:

Some three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center and one of their parents.

Nina Williams, a stay-at-home mom in Lake County, Indiana, tells us that her daughter recently called her from her job at the center, upset that she had been asked to read a script attacking Obama for being “dangerously weak on crime,” “coddling criminals,” and for voting against “protecting children from danger.”

Williams’ daughter told her that up to 40 of her co-workers had refused to read the script, and had left the call center after supervisors told them that they would have to either read the call or leave, Williams says. The call center is called Americall, and it’s located in Hobart, IN.

I’ve sent an e-mail to Americall, considering they are right near my house, telling them how these tactics are to be regarded.

From my e-mail:

To whom it may concern,

It has come to my attention that personnel at the Hobart branch of Americall Group have been directed to disseminate inflammatory and slanderous messages directed at Barack Obama and other Democratic politicians to prospective voters.

http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/10/dozens_of_call_center_workers.php

Hearing that telemarketers under your employ are to be denied wages for standing up against these mercenary tactics, if true, is despicable. Being that your Hobart office is blocks away from my house this makes news of these events even more infuriating, that “hired-guns” are spreading lies and misinformation right behind our backs.

I should hope that along with your entrepreneurial aspirations for making money the same effort will be made to maintain ethical business associations, and perhaps attention be given to the accuracy of your messages. Buying into this loop-hole of the robocalling ban makes your corporation no better than paid character assassins.

There’s nothing like being forced by your employers to lie and work against the individual you wish to vote for. Gotta love the last few days in the battleground states.