Miscellaneous Heathen

Anti-civil-rights senator Jesse Helms has finally gone to his eternal reward. Good riddance.

Betty Bowers has a fine list of quotes from the late Senator.

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

This isn't just what we believe. It's what is TRUE. People have rights, period. Governments do not grant them; governments are created to secure them.

Somewhere along the way, this administration forgot -- or abandoned -- these ideals.

Monkey Bartenders.

Annoyed at a perceived slight by some NYT reporters, Fox News ran photos of the men that had been edited to make them ugly -- receding hairlines, yellow teeth, exaggerated features, etc. Click the link for Media Matters' coverage, which includes side-by-side comparisons of the original photos and the Fox versions.

In the afternoon of deck-clearing, we find this MeFi post which refers to this NYT story about a New York apartment remodeling job that included, unbidden, a sequence of puzzles the owners eventually figured out. There's a slideshow as well. File under "what you can get for $8 million," we reckon, but it's still cool as hell. I mean, hello: secret compartments! Codes! What's not to like?

You get TV with no context at all, which must be part of the point of this bit of web goodness. (Via JWZ.)

Bruce Schneier explains why killswitches are a bad idea. Basically, it comes down to a question of whether or not items you buy are owned by you, or by others.

People seem to continually forget to ask "what will happen with this new regulation or feature is misused?" when they ask for schemes like this. It's not a question of whether it'll be hacked; it's a question of when.

Someone has figured out the rough size, shape, and density of Azeroth, i.e. the world in which World of Warcraft takes place, based on observable in-game experiments.

From Scalzi:

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”

“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Seen in Los Angeles.

There's some gold in the comments, btw.

Ducks.

(Via MeFi.)

Check out this post over at the Agitator, especially if you still think of the GOP as the party of fiscal responsibility and limited government.

Via John Gruber's Daring Fireball, we find this amusing story, wherein Sony CEO Howard Stringer contrasts Apple and Sony: "Apple is a marvelous company, but it is a boutique. We are a giant conglomerate."

Well, maybe so, but here's Gruber's take:

As for just how giant, Sony’s current market cap is about $44 billion. The boutique’s market cap is about three times larger, at $149 billion. In terms of net income for the most recently reported financial year, Sony’s was $3.7 billion; Apple’s was $3.5 billion.

Heh.

Ladies and gentlemen: Los Straitjackets perform My Heart Will Go On:

TPM:

The Bush Administration's newest tactic for policymaking is to ignore emails.

The New York Times reports today that White House officials simply refused to open an email from the EPA last year because they knew it contained a policy recommendation they didn't like -- part of the Administration's on-going battle with scientists at the EPA over global warming issues.

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.'s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

These clowns can't be out of office soon enough. The damage they've done to our country will take a generation to repair.

Dear Intarwub: Please buy us this sink. kthxbi.

"Brothel Bus"

From: (forged)
Subject: Get your watch now
Date: June 26, 2008 5:54:24 PM CDT
To: Chief Heathen

Did you watch the last 007 flick, Casino Royale? If you did, you probably noticed that all throughout the movie, James Bond wears an spectacularly beautiful Omega watch... and he even brags about it! How would you like to be wearing that same exact model watch?

What, you mean like this?

Vice President Chet? It could happen.

Rightwing fruitcake fundie James Dobson is upset that Obama knows the Bible is a poor choice for a governing document.

In comments aired on his radio show Tuesday, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson criticized the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for comments he made in a June 2006 speech to the liberal Christian group Call to Renewal.

In the speech, Obama suggested that it would be impractical to govern based solely on the word of the Bible, noting that some passages suggest slavery is permissible and eating shellfish is disgraceful.

"Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy?" Obama asked in the speech. "Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is OK and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount?

"So before we get carried away, let's read our Bible now," Obama said, to cheers. "Folks haven't been reading their Bible."

and

Dobson also takes aim at Obama for suggesting in the speech that those motivated by religion should attempt to appeal to broader segments of the population by not just framing their arguments around religious precepts.

"Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal rather than religion-specific values," Obama said. "It requires their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason."

Keep digging, Jimmy. Keep digging.