Via DaringFireball:
The point isn’t MICROSOFT SUXXX0RS!!! AAPL ROOLZ!!!, though if you had to boil it down to four words those ones are much closer to true than to false. Rather, the problem is that Microsoft is the Detroit of software. It makes big, ugly, dangerous, resource-hogging crap, and its “success” is based on…its “success.”
That is the name of a coloring book created by FEMA, supposedly to help kids deal with catastrophes. You be the judge. The cover is below. (h/t ANIMAL)
If you liked Supersize Me, King Corn, Fast Food Nation, Our Daily Bread or any of the other recent food production films, you will probably like Food Inc., coming out in June. If it is recommended by Alice Waters, that’s good enough for me.
Consumers love their iPhone. Except for battery power.
The H1N1 virus is still raising hell in Mexico.
Mexico urged its citizens to stay home Thursday, suspending government services and asking businesses to close for five days, amid the World Health Organization’s warning that a global flu pandemic appeared imminent.
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Mexican President Felipe Calderon said in a televised address that only essential businesses such as supermarkets, hospitals and pharmacies should stay open, and only critical government workers such as police and soldiers would be on duty from Friday through Tuesday. School had already been canceled nationwide.
This means that a pandemic is imminent. From the official statement:
All countries should immediately activate their pandemic preparedness plans. Countries should remain on high alert for unusual outbreaks of influenza-like illness and severe pneumonia.
The various levels of pandemic can be seen here. This is the description of phase 5:
Phase 5 is characterized by human-to-human spread of the virus into at least two countries in one WHO region. While most countries will not be affected at this stage, the declaration of Phase 5 is a strong signal that a pandemic is imminent and that the time to finalize the organization, communication, and implementation of the planned mitigation measures is short.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, there are now 64 confirmed cases in five states in the United States.
The Ninth Circuit has ruled, in United States v. Reynolds, in effect, that a claim of “state secrets” cannot be sufficient to grant immunity to the government by an outright dismissal of a case. Rather, the government must proceed with the case and argue about specific items of evidence and whether such evidence is privileged from disclosure under the doctrine.
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“This historic decision marks the beginning, not the end, of this litigation,” said Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, who argued the case for the plaintiffs. “Our clients, who are among the hundreds of victims of torture under the Bush administration, have waited for years just to get a foot in the courthouse door. Now, at long last, they will have their day in court. Today’s ruling demolishes once and for all the legal fiction, advanced by the Bush administration and continued by the Obama administration, that facts known throughout the world could be deemed ‘secrets’ in a court of law.”
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The full text of the case is here.
Update: And Glen Greenwald offers his thoughtful take here.
The Ninth Circuit has ruled, in United States v. Reynolds, in effect, that a claim of “state secrets” cannot be sufficient to grant immunity to the government by an outright dismissal of a case. Rather, the government must proceed with the case and argue about specific items of evidence and whether such evidence is privileged from disclosure under the doctrine.
“This historic decision marks the beginning, not the end, of this litigation,” said Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, who argued the case for the plaintiffs. “Our clients, who are among the hundreds of victims of torture under the Bush administration, have waited for years just to get a foot in the courthouse door. Now, at long last, they will have their day in court. Today’s ruling demolishes once and for all the legal fiction, advanced by the Bush administration and continued by the Obama administration, that facts known throughout the world could be deemed ‘secrets’ in a court of law.”
The full text of the case is here.
Update: And Glen Greenwald offers his thoughtful take here.
… and this new license plate clinches the deal.
Ross Douthat has an interesting hypothetical in today’s NYT. What if Dick Cheney had run for president? If he had lost to Obama it might have actually helped the Republican party to realize that the “true conservatism” that Cheney represents is not a road to the White House.
At the very least, a Cheney-Obama contest would have clarified conservatism’s present political predicament. In the wake of two straight drubbings at the polls, much of the American right has comforted itself with the idea that conservatives lost the country primarily because the Bush-era Republican Party spent too much money on social programs. And John McCain’s defeat has been taken as the vindication of this premise.
We tried running the maverick reformer, the argument goes, and look what it got us. What Americans want is real conservatism, not some crypto-liberal imitation.
“Real conservatism,” in this narrative, means a particular strain of right-wingery: a conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions, uninterested in social policy and dismissive of libertarian qualms about the national-security state. And Dick Cheney happens to be its diamond-hard distillation. The former vice-president kept his distance from the Bush administration’s attempts at domestic reform, and he had little time for the idealistic, religiously infused side of his boss’s policy agenda. He was for tax cuts at home and pre-emptive warfare overseas; anything else he seemed to disdain as sentimentalism.
You gotta see this.
Apparently, the local authorities were told not to alert the public. What were they thinking? The White House has issued a statement. Supposedly the President was “furious.” I bet.
What would it be like if you plotted the Dow Jones Industrial Average to a rollercoaster ride? Take a look. (h/t Andrew Sullivan)