Blackmoor Vituperative

Just for general grins, here is what’s on my playlist today.

• Concrete Blonde, Mojave, 2004
• Concrete Blonde, Group Therapy, 2002
• Fields of the Nephilim, Elizium, 1990
• Fields of the Nephilim, The Nephilim, 1988
• Fields of the Nephilim, Dawnrazor, 1987
• Hooverphonic, Jackie Cane, 2002
• India Arie, Acoustic Soul, 2001
• India Arie, Voyage To India, 2002
• Queen, Greatest Hits I, II & III (The Platinum Collection), 2001
• Sweeney Todd, 1979 Original Broadway Cast, 1979

Everything but India Arie is an old favorite. She’s new to me, but she performed at Circuit City’s Store Support Center (aka the corporate office) on Friday, and I liked her music, so I am checking it out.

I have long been of the opinion that religion — more specifically, Protestant Christianity as it is practiced in the USA, the religion with which I am the most familiar — is fundamentally anti-life and anti-human. In other words, evil.

It’s just an opinion. Many reasonably-intelligent, well-intentioned people disagree with me, and I do not think less of them for it. However…

Imagine a vaccine that would protect women from a serious gynecological cancer. Wouldn’t that be great? Well, both Merck and GlaxoSmithKline recently announced that they have conducted successful trials of vaccines that protect against the human papilloma virus. HPV is not only an incredibly widespread sexually transmitted infection but is responsible for at least 70 percent of cases of cervical cancer, which is diagnosed in 10,000 American women a year and kills 4,000. Wonderful, you are probably thinking, all we need to do is vaccinate girls (and boys too for good measure) before they become sexually active, around puberty, and HPV — and, in thirty or forty years, seven in ten cases of cervical cancer — goes poof. Not so fast: We’re living in God’s country now. The Christian right doesn’t like the sound of this vaccine at all. “Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful,” Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told the British magazine New Scientist, “because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.” Raise your hand if you think that what is keeping girls virgins now is the threat of getting cervical cancer when they are 60 from a disease they’ve probably never heard of.

(from The Nation, Virginity or Death!)

The next day President-elect Bush came to the White House for the same meeting I had had with his father eight years earier. […] He was putting together an experiened team from past Republican administrations who believed the biggest security issues were the need for national missile defense and Iraq. I told him that based on the last eight years, I thought his biggest security problems, in order, would be Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda; the absence of peace in the Middle East; the stand off between nuclear powers India and Pakistan, and the ties of the Pakistanis to the Taliban and al Qaeda; North Korea; and then Iraq.[…]

He listened to what I had to say without much comment then changed the subject…

(from My Life, W.J. Clinton, pg. 1503-1504)

With the attitude that the current US administration takes toward spying on its own citizens, and the poor record that the US government in general has with abiding by the limits imposed on its power, if there’s one word that ought to give every American (and resident alien) the willies, it’s “biosurveillance”. It conjures up the nightmarish of convergence between biometric identification and universal surveillance — a convergence that gets nearer to reality every day. However, the Department of Homeland Security is actually trying to live up to its mandate with this project. The goal of this surveillance is not the American populace, but the biosphere around us.

If bird flu erupts in the United States, the Homeland Security Department’s access to real-time data will be vital in spotting its emergence.

With that in mind, DHS is developing the National Biosurveillance Integration System to track and combine data it will receive electronically from several agencies’ public health, food, animal, air and water monitoring systems.

The ambitious system, designed to give DHS a national biosurveillance picture, is a critical piece of the administration’s strategy for responding to a pandemic such as avian flu. But the technology, policy and culture change associated with the system will present challenges for DHS.

The system is designed to aggregate and integrate information from local, state and federal agencies’ bio-monitoring systems and combine it with data from the intelligence community, said Kimothy Smith, DHS chief veterinarian, chief scientist and acting deputy chief medical officer.

(from Government Computer News, DHS lays the groundwork for biosurveillance

That’s pretty darned cool.

Pick up people in your vortex and then drop them for maximum splatter.

Experimental Gameplay Project

I found this at Snopes.com.

Aggravated about paying for 411 calls that used to free? While waiting for connecting flights this morning, I stumbled onto this nifty money-saver: A free consumer service offered in the United States by Jingle Networks via a toll-free number, 800-FREE-411 (800-373-3411).

This free network works much like directory assistance, with one exception: It’s funded by advertising. Callers may hear a 13-second ad for a business in the region they’re calling. And, the business or residence being called will hear a message about advertising with Free 411.

Based on a test of three calls by Snopes.com, the service worked as described and callers heard only one ad.

(from Snopes.com, Free 411)

With Hank and Dean Venture presumably dead, Doc and Brock carry on as Team Venture and seek revenge on The Monarch and other villains in the second season of the series from Jackson Publick and Adult Swim. New episodes begin June 25.

I just finished watching King Arthur, the gritty 5th century interpretation with Clive Owen and Keira Knightley. I enjoyed it. It reminded me a great deal of The 13th Warrior. I liked 13th Warrior better, but on the other hand, 13th Warrior didn’t have Keira Knightley.

Speaking of Keira Knightley, her “warrior” outfit doesn’t leave much to the imagination: I was kind of surpised at how svelte she looked. Something tickled at the back of my mind about it. It seemed like I had seen her in that outfit before, and she was a little more curvy. Low and behold, the wonders of creative marketing.

Kenneth Kwak, 34, of Chantilly, Va., admitted to installing remote control software on the computer and using that access to read his supervisor’s e-mail and monitor other Internet activity, the U.S Department of Justice said in a statement Friday. Kwak shared this information with others in his office, the DOJ said.

Kwak pleaded guilty last month to one count of intentionally gaining unauthorized access to a government computer and thereby obtaining information, the DOJ said. He was sentenced on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The five-month sentence is to be followed by five months of home confinement.

As part of the sentence, Kwak was also ordered to pay the U.S. government $40,000 in restitution. He will be on parole for three years.

Kwak was responsible for securing Department of Education computers. His prosecution was part of the “zero-tolerance policy” recently adopted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office regarding intrusions into U.S. government computer systems, the DOJ said.

(from ZDNet, Ex-government employee sentenced for hacking)

He should have known better. That was just stupid.

According to InfoWorld, last week Microsoft stock hit its lowest price since October 2002, and that was after Steve Ballmer sent an e-mail to reassure Microsofties that although the company’s stock price is falling, the sky is not. Fortunately for the world’s richest man, Bill Gates sold off $500 million worth of stock in February when the price was still relatively high. Microsoft spokesfolk call it “prudent portfolio diversification”.