Robert Scoble, who blogs for Microsoft, has been blogging about his mother recently dying from a stroke, and how that’s changed him. In addition to being a superb post, he touches on the unfortunate amount of hostility sometimes found in blog comments.

I’m glad I went through this personal time after my mom’s stroke. It helped me refocus on what’s important and what my blog means to me. This blog is mine. It is what I’m thinking about, and what I’m seeing in my life. It isn’t a news article. I am not vetted. It isn’t done by a committee. I am not being held to any standards.

On the other hand, I don’t like the lynch mob. It’s going to take a strong blogger to stand up against hundreds of blogs who are urging action one way. But, we need that kind of diversity of ideas if we are going to make this a truly strong media.

The lynch mob. Maybe it’s because I’m an antiwar organizer and more used to such things, but they’re just part of the background. You don’t have to focus on them. And don’t take it personally either.

There’s something about posting comments on blogs and boards that brings out the worst in people. They’ll say things they’d never say in person to you. That fire-breathing dragon in the comments sometimes turns out to be an introverted nebbish in person.

You can, of course, delete comments. I deleted a multitude of them recently on an immigrant rights thead. There’s no need to respond to attacks either, unless, of course, you want to or have a witty putdown for them.

At antiwar protests, some will go up to counter-demonstrators and try to convince them to change their mind. Why bother? If they’re hardcore enough to be there, you won’t change them. Work the middle instead.

Best advice: “Talk to those who want to listen.”

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Joe Hartley emails:

“You may want to take a look at the NY Review of Books this week. It has an interesting article by Michael Massing on the controversy that has arisen as a result of the Mearshimer-Walt article challenging the Israeli lobby. Look in particular who AIPAC contributes to, and you may understand why the Dems have been so quiet on the Middle East.”

Hmmm, many of us in the antiwar movement have understood that for quite a while and know all about AIPAC!

Excerpt from the article:

The centerpiece of US policy in the Middle East has been its unwavering support for Israel, and that this has not been in America’s best interest. In their view, the “extraordinary generosity” the US showers on Israel— the nearly $3 billion in direct foreign assistance it provides every year, the access it gives Israel to “top-drawer” weapons like F-16 jets, the thirty-two UN Security Council resolutions critical of Israel that it has vetoed since 1982, the “wide latitude” it has given Israel in dealing with the occupied territories—all this “might be understandable if Israel were a vital strategic asset or if there were a compelling moral case for sustained US backing.”

In fact, they write, “neither rationale is convincing.” Israel may have had strategic value for the US during the cold war when the Soviet Union had heavy influence in Egypt and Syria, but that has long since faded. Since September 11, Israel has been cast as a crucial ally in the war on terror, but actually, according to Mearsheimer and Walt, it has been more of a liability; its close ties to America have served as a rallying point for Osama bin Laden and other anti-American extremists. Morally, Israel qualifies as a democracy, the authors write, but it’s a deeply flawed one, discriminating against its Arab citizens and oppressing the Palestinians who have lived under its occupation.

Joe continues:

“Also, a few weeks ago Willam Pfaff wrote an insightful article about American foreign policy in the Middle East. While some insist on reducing everything to economics, Pfaff has some non-economic insights that actually explain more than the reductionist economic arguments.”

The announced American ambition is to make the Arab states democracies and install a liberal order in the region. Israelis, being realists, understand that this is a fantasy. Israel’s own interests depend on the exercise of power in ways unwelcome to the Arab peoples, and this depends on a permanent American willingness - and competence - to dominate the region on Israel’s behalf. And this, as politically perceptive Israelis may grasp, could prove a profoundly unrealistic assumption.

Superpowers can afford the illusion that empires “make” the reality that suits them. Small powers cannot afford such rashness. That seems to me Israel’s dilemma.

A desire by an empire for geopolitical dominance is driven primarily by economics. The empire needs ever more markets to sell to, more cheap labor and resources to exploit. Some err by thinking the Israel tail wags the U.S. dog whereas in reality, Israel would not exist without U.S. support.

The cause of the Palestinians continues to inject itself into U.S. politics, despite the efforts of AIPAC, who clearly are weakening. There can be no peace in the Middle East until Palestinians have a homeland - that would be the land stolen from them - that they govern and can call their own.

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Statement by the East Timor and Indonesia Action Network (ETAN) on the current violence in Timor-Leste

We have watched the unfolding situation in Timor-Leste this past week with deep concern. We do not believe that events had to escalate to this point. Like others, we do not have complete information about the current situation and its causes. Below are our initial reflections:

The intervention by foreign military and police forces is a sad event for Timor-Leste, whose hard-won political independence has had to be laid aside ­ we hope for only a short time ­ because leaders and state institutions have been unable to manage certain violent elements of the population and security forces.

Now that foreign forces are being deployed — at the request of Timor-Leste’s government, with the stated support of rebel leaders, and the welcome by most of a terrified population — we hope that they serve their intended purpose in quelling the violence and allowing negotiations and a peaceful resolution, as well as the identification and arrest of those who have committed crimes.

Outside intervention is a temporary solution at best. Timor-Leste must find ways, with respectful support from the international community, to deal with problems in a manner that will not require troops.

Statements by Australian government leaders that providing security assistance entitles them to influence over Timor-Leste’s government are undemocratic, paternalistic, and unhelpful. Who governs Timor-Leste is a decision to be made by its people within its constitution.

More

Statement on the disputed oil in the Timor Sea

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Global warming may lead to more, and nastier, poison ivy

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And hello Panda Platinum Internet Security Suite.

This intelligent, unintrusive security suite does it all easily and quickly, and without popping up endless, pointless alerts or being a resource hog. What a pleasant change.

Full details on my tech blog.

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Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones says he is tormented by two memories of Nov. 19, 2005, in Haditha, Iraq.

The first is of the body of his best friend and fellow Marine blown apart just after dawn by a roadside bomb. The second is of the lifeless form of a small Iraqi girl, one of two dozen unarmed civilians allegedly killed by members of his Camp Pendleton unit — Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division.

He’s at home now, suffering from PTSD, says he was not one of those being investigated., helped in the cleanup and took photos with his cell camera.

When he came back he said he dropped his Olympus 3.2 megapixel camera by the unmanned Sparta base command operations center. When he returned a few hours later he said it looked like the camera had been moved so he assumed someone had downloaded the pictures and he erased them all.

But whether the photos ever reached authorities, who also have pictures from an intelligence investigation team and another source, is not clear.

I find that part odd. The camera contained evidence. Yet there was no check-in procedure for it, and he just assumed the photos had been downloaded and took the camera back?

What happened at Haditha, friends and family say, made him crazy, and 36 hours after returning home, he stole a truck, crashed it drunk, left the scene, resisted arrest, and is now out on $35,000 bail.

[His mother] said she is angry at what she described as the Marines’ failure to adequately “decompress” him and other Marines when they come home from combat. She said she was writing a book to help other families avoid what she and her son are going through.

“I used to be one of those Marines who said that post-traumatic stress is a bunch of bull,” said Ryan Briones, who has prescriptions for anti-depressants and sleeping pills. “But all this stuff that keeps going through my head is eating me up. I need immediate help.”

Briones, of course, is responsible for his own actions. However, as Sue says, no one ever recovers from war - most especially not from atrocities like Haditha.

Someone I know who was caught in a war zone overnight a few years returned to the States, couldn’t sleep, was anxious. He went to his M.D., who said you have PTSD and recommended a therapy group. He went, it was mostly Vietnam vets, and they accepted him completely. He’s fine now. His PTSD was ‘minor’ compared to what Briones (and thousands of other Iraq War vets) must be going through. Well, it wasn’t minor to him, but still, he didn’t have to see toddlers and moms who had been executed in cold blood.

The psychological damage from this war will haunt us for decades to come. It reminds of the Steve Earle line about a Vietnam Vet, “and I wake up screaming like I’m back over there.”

How many more?

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Witnesses said American soldiers fired on Afghans throwing stones at them after the crash, though the United States military said only that warning shots had been fired in the air.
…
It became clear the American military and the Afghan police and army had used their weapons to try to disperse the crowds. Scores of people were treated in hospitals for gunshot wounds.

If you’re being attacked by a furious mob that is throwing stones at you, most would say you have the right to shoot in self-defense. So why doesn’t the Pentagon just say that, rather than have the truth seep out later anyway and be caught yet again in lies.

Also, what was the nature of the “mechanical failure” that led to the crash? No report on that anywhere yet.

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When cities hire firms to run utilities, they seek quality at lower cost. They may get ethics scandals, violations and irate consumers.

In some places, private-sector management helped trim bureaucracies and replace decaying infrastructure, local officials say. But in Indianapolis, New Orleans, Atlanta and other cities, privatization has been accompanied by corruption scandals, environmental violations and a torrent of customer complaints.

In Atlanta, residents began complaining of brown, brackish drinking water soon after the French company Suez and a subsidiary began running the water system under a $428-million, 20-year contract.

In New Orleans, officials blamed a subsidiary of Veolia Environnement, another French company, for illegally discharging sewage into the Mississippi River on dozens of occasions.

In Milwaukee, a Suez subsidiary caused 107 million gallons of untreated sewage to be discharged into streams and Lake Michigan, a 2002 state audit found.

The article details many more such instances. Water is too precious and too basic a human right to be turned over the private industry, whose primary goal is maximizing profit for themselves and shareholders. Water should stay public.

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U.S. policy was to shoot Korean refugees

More than a half-century after hostilities ended in Korea, a document from the war’s chaotic early days has come to light — a letter from the U.S. ambassador to Seoul, informing the State Department that American soldiers would shoot refugees approaching their lines.

The letter — dated the day of the Army’s mass killing of South Korean refugees at No Gun Ri in 1950 — is the strongest indication yet that such a policy existed for all U.S. forces in Korea, and the first evidence that that policy was known to upper ranks of the U.S. government.

Thus, the policy was to shoot unarmed civilians, which makes it a war crime.

Link via DJ Mitchell, who says:

I don’t know which is worse– that it was policy in Korea for the U.S. Army to shoot refugees, or that the Pentagon (in a 2001 report) covered it up.
I seem to have lost my country.  Has anyone seen it?

Well, if it wasn’t here in 1950, then it’s been lost for a long time, hasn’t it?

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The shootings last November at Haditha, a city in the Anbar province of western Iraq that has been plagued by insurgents, were covered up, said Rep. John Murtha.

“Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long?” Murtha said on “This Week” on ABC. “We don’t know how far it goes. It goes right up the chain of command.”

A powerful Republican concurs

Sen. John Warner, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he would hold hearings on the killings but cautioned against reaching conclusions until the military concluded its investigation.

“There is this serious question, however, of what happened and when it happened and what was the immediate reaction of the senior officers in the Marine Corps when they began to gain knowledge of it,” Warner said.

Death penalty could be sought

US Marines could face the death penalty after one of their number took horrific photographs of a massacre in Iraq on his mobile phone, The Independent on Sunday has learned.

As in Abu Ghraib, what brought them down was the ubiquitous cell phone camera. Here’s a tip for deranged young murderers. Don’t take photos of your victims as this makes you much easier to catch.

The photographs, seized by the US Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), show many victims shot at close range in the head and chest, execution-style, according to sources who have seen them. One image shows a mother and young child bent over on the floor as if in prayer. Both have been shot dead.

So the alleged humans responsible for this atrocity then took photos of it…

The coverup

It’s crucial to understand that the Penatgon lied and deceived about this from Day One and only opened the investigation after an Iraqi Human Rights group got the videos and forced the issue. Until then, it was the usual making-shit-up.

The Independent article continues, and details clearly and precisely how the Pentagon twisted and distorted the truth, lying continually and steadily.

The official account of what happened in Haditha on 19 November has gradually unravelled since the initial claim that one Marine, 20-year-old Lance-Corporal Miguel Terrazas, and 15 Iraqi civilians were killed when a roadside bomb went off next to a convoy of Humvees passing through the town.

Gunmen “attacked the convoy with small-arms fire”, a statement added, and the Marines returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding one. It appears that the wounded man later died, bringing the number of Iraqis killed to 24. The Marines did not begin to change their story until an Iraqi human rights group obtained the journalism student’s video, which showed that no Iraqis were killed in the bomb explosion. The houses where they died were bullet-riddled inside, but had no external marks, casting doubts on the soldiers’ claims that there had been a firefight.

After Time magazine took up the story, an infantry colonel was sent to Haditha for an inquiry which concluded that the 15 civilians, including several women and six children, died as a result of the Marines’ actions rather than the bombing. But at this stage the deaths were called “collateral damage”.

As the IoS reported on 26 March, the Marines were still claiming then that the nine young men who died - five in a taxi close to the scene of the bombing, plus four brothers in a nearby house - were armed fighters. One military spokeswoman blamed them for the deaths of the other 15 Iraqis, because they “placed non-combatants in the line of fire as the Marines responded to defend themselves”.

Details emerging from the official investigation since then have confirmed the IoS report that all the Iraqis killed were civilians, and that all the shooting that day was by the Marines. According to local people, the rampage lasted three to five hours, and one man shot by the Marines was allowed to bleed to death for hours while his pleas for help were ignored.

Andrew Murray, chair of the Stop the War Coalition, said: “It’s clear that what happened in Haditha is a war crime. It would be idle to think this is the first war crime that has been committed in the last three years. It must be assumed that more of this is going on.”

Precisely.

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Senate Republicans were divided Thursday voting on the immigration bill — 23 voted for and 32 voted against it.

Until now, the GOP has been united between the corporate wing and the social conservatives, said Ross K. Baker, a Rutgers University political scientist. Now, Republicans are divided between the group that wants the cheap labor and those overwhelmed by the rising tide of immigrants, he said.

Lefties: Let’s turn this new Republican divide into the Grand Canyon.

Here’s another stress fracture to exploit -

Constitutional clash could lead to resignations

As Congress and the Bush administration argued publicly last week over the extraordinary raid of a congressman’s office, a high-stakes dispute simmered behind the scenes — top Justice Department officials indicated they’d resign if ordered to turn over documents seized in the search.

The wheels are falling off the once well-organized and disciplined Republican machine. Let’s help the process along. Not that Democrats are much better, hey, they’ve enthusiastically backed the wars and destruction of constitutional rights too. However the more body blows the crumbling neocon machine receives, the better. Their inevitable and soon-to-come collapse will be a victory for the people.

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From the Rock & Rap Confidential listserv quoting their May issue. They said, feel free to forward or re-post, so I am.

Rock the Vote is in shambles. According to a February 7 LA Times article by Charles Duhigg, the organization is $700,000 in debt and has cut its staff from twenty people in 2004 to two today. Rock the Vote hasn’t had a chief operating officer since the last Presidential election.
Duhigg attributes the crisis to overspending in non-election years and to the opportunism of the music industry executives who dominate the group’s board and use Rock the Vote primarily to promote their own artists.

Rock the Vote has a more fundamental problem: It has hitched its star to politicians who are completely hostile to the needs and desires of the American people. For example, check out the political hacks it has chosen to bestow its Rock the Nation Award upon.

There’s Bill Clinton, who presided over the 1996 Democratic Party convention which removed universal health care from the party platform even though more than 70 per cent of Americans are in favor of it.

There’s Hilary Rosen, who was head of the RIAA at the time she was honored. Rosen rocked the nation by launching the war against file-sharing. Sharing music on-line is, to say the least, wildly popular.

There’s Hilary Clinton, who, despite the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, has called for sending 80,000 more of our sons and daughters to the slaughter.

In June 2005, the Rock the Nation Award went to John McCain, one month after the Arizona Senator was part of the 100-0 Senate vote to approve Bush’s war funding bill. In his acceptance speech, McCain introduced himself as “Funk Master McCain.” Since then, Funk Master McCain has kept busy campaigning for California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose November ballot initiatives to cripple unions and give himself unsupervised power to gut social programs were soundly defeated by California voters.

In 2004, Rock the Vote, under the leadership of Jehmu Greene (who came to the organization directly from serving as Southern Political Director of the Democratic National Committee), registered 1.4 million voters in an effort to elect John Kerry. On March 2 of this year Kerry was one of 89 Senators who voted to make the Patriot Act permanent, even though more than 250 U.S. cities have passed resolutions calling for it to be abolished.

One of Rock the Vote’s few high points came in the early 1990s when the organization aired over 175 public service announcements in which artists gave their frank views on democracy. Our favorite was Ice-T’s. “I’m as anti ‘the system’ as you could possibly be,” he said. “We’ve got two options–the vote or hostile takeover. I’m down with either one.”

In other words, voter registration as a tactic can be useful when it’s part of an effort to transform the system. When voter registration is used as a strategy, what you get is Rock the Vote. It won’t be missed.

Like MoveOn.org and net roots, Rock the Vote is essentially a fund-raising/recruiting arm of the Democratic Party and not interested in actual change, just in boosting the Democratic Party who, as RockRap points out, is just as complicit in the wars and dismantling of the social net as the Republicans.

While a Democratic take-over of one or both houses of Congress would be a satisfying kick in the teeth to the neocons, don’t expect Democrats to do anything different on the war(s.) Heck, most of them supported the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions. Ditto for supporting CIA torture prisons and the erosion of civil liberties. The real change will come when people in the street demand it, and not through thinly-disguised fund-raising and recruitment schemes.

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The Party for Socialism and Liberation: Recent accomplishments and outlook

PSL is a coalition partner of the ANSWER Coalition, both nationally and in Los Angeles. Thompson discusses the political and organizational goals of the party, recent events such as mass antiwar demonstrations and immigrant right marches where the party played an important role, as well as the outlook for the summer.

You may be surprised to learn how much PSL, who are action and results-oriented, is doing.

mp3 (16:26, 5.64mb)

Recorded at a Party for Socialism and Liberation meeting in L.A. May 26, 2006.

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This is not exactly news, but the national Democratic Party is one big stinking dead horse. If they could muster only 15 votes against a man who has overseen the most extensive and intrusive violation of privacy in American history (although “outright rape” is a better term for what the Bush gang has done to Americans’ constitutional and human rights), then what in God’s name are they good for?

Begging for money while pretending to be an opposition? Hmm, the Democrats are rudderless while the Republicans are fracturing into squabbling factions. This is the time for a third party to emerge.

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Way cool. Take Google Maps and allow anyone to annotate it. (Only works in FireFox currently.)

From Google Maps Mania

Wikimapia lets anyone add or edit a description for any place on earth (without registering). It also provides a new, unique way of browsing Google Maps satellite images.

I wonder how long it will be before spambots start adding entries…

Here’s downtown L.A.

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We’ll be hearing a lot about the Hatidha Massacre was done by a few deranged soldiers. Don’t believe it. The derangement goes right up the food chain and into the top command.

On Friday, the New York Times reported that preliminary results of a military inquiry showed that the civilians killed in the city last November had not died from a makeshift bomb, as the Pentagon had initially stated, nor in a crossfire with insurgents, as was later announced.

Translation: The Pentagon lied twice.

One of the most damning pieces of evidence investigators have in their possession, John Sifton of Human Rights Watch told TIME’s Tim McGirk, is a photo, taken by a Marine with his cell phone that shows Iraqis kneeling — and thus posing no threat — before they were shot.

Natural Born Killers

Aws Fahmi, a Haditha resident who said he watched and listened from his home as Marines went from house to house killing members of three families, recalled hearing his neighbor across the street, Younis Salim Khafif, plead in English for his life and the lives of his family members. “I heard Younis speaking to the Americans, saying: ‘I am a friend. I am good,’ ” Fahmi said. “But they killed him, and his wife and daughters.”

The girls killed inside Khafif’s house were ages 14, 10, 5, 3 and 1, according to death certificates.

Wow, it takes some kind of macho he-man to murder a one year old. What a sick fuck. Him, his fellow soldiers, and everyone up the chain of command, they are all culpable. Their crimes are not ones of omission. They knew precisely what was happening and participated.

Another point of dispute is whether some houses were destroyed by fire or by airstrikes. Some Iraqis reported that the Marines burned houses in the area of the attack, but two people familiar with the case, including Hackett, the lawyer, said warplanes conducted airstrikes, dropping 500-pound bombs on more than one house.

That is significant for any possible court-martial proceedings, because it would indicate that senior commanders, who must approve such strikes and who would also use aircraft to assess their effects, were paying attention to events in Haditha that day.

Uruknet is eloquent on this.

This isn’t the only investigation either. From the San Diego Union-Tribune.

[It] was announced yesterday that other Marines are being held in a separate investigation of the death of an Iraqi man in April.

The April 26 death happened in Hamandiyah, a village west of Baghdad. It involved members of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment.

How massacres become the norm

Robert J. Lifton is a prominent American psychiatrist who lobbied for the inclusion of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders after his work with US veterans from Vietnam. His studies on the behavior of those who have committed war crimes led him to believe it does not require an unusual level of mental illness or of personal evil to carry out such crimes. Rather, these crimes are nearly guaranteed to occur in what Lifton refers to as “atrocity-producing situations.”

Several of his books, like The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, examine how abnormal conditions work on normal minds, enabling them to commit the most horrendous crimes imaginable.

Iraq today is most certainly an “atrocity-producing situation,” as it has been from the very beginning of the occupation.

The only way to prevent any of this from being repeated ad infinitum is to remove US soldiers from their “atrocity-producing situation” in Iraq. For it is clearer than ever that the longer the failed, illegal occupation persists, the larger will be the numbers of Iraqis slaughtered by the occupation forces.

“Atrocity-producing situations” not only include the desire for vengeance anyone would feel when a compatriot is killed in combat but also includes a military hierarchy that either implicity or openly encourages such behavior, demonizes the enemy as subhuman, sees the conflict in apocalyptic religious terms, and is incapable of seeing that invading countries based on lies can only lead to blowback - the unintended consequences on one’s own actions coming back to haunt them.

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Inside the Bolivarian Revolution

Gloria La Riva discusses recent developments in Venezuela, why the U.S. government is bent on overthrowing the revolutionary process and talks about what progressives and revolutionaries living in the U.S. can do to show solidarity with the Venezuelan people. Among other topics, she focuses on the major gains in education and health care there.

La Riva is a PSL leader from San Francisco and active in the Committee to Free the Five. She has travelled extensively to Venezuela and Cuba.

mp3 (49:05, 16.8mb)

Recorded at a Party for Socialism and Liberation meeting in L.A. May 26, 2006.

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“When these investigations come out, there’s going to be a firestorm,” said retired Brig. Gen. David M. Brahms, formerly a top lawyer for the Marine Corps. “It will be worse than Abu Ghraib – nobody was killed at Abu Ghraib.”

‘Worst war crime’ committed by US in Iraq

John Kline, the Republican Congressmen for Minnesota who is a retired marine colonel, was briefed on the findings. “This was not an accident. This was direct fire by marines at civilians,” he told the New York Times. “This was not an immediate response to an attack. This would be an atrocity.”

When the Lynndie England case first broke, a friend who was wounded in ‘Nam said, ‘that little girl didn’t do that on her own, she’s a private, they don’t do anything on their own. Someone ordered her to do it.’

The commandant of the marine corps, Gen Michael Hagee, flew to Iraq on Thursday to instruct his troops that they must abide by the Geneva Convention and the US military’s own rules of engagement.

This ranks up there with Ken Lay’s slimy, santimonous proclamations that he was innocent. Hagee is either covering up or incompetent. Regardless, ultimate responsibility for the atrocity is his. He should resign or be relieved of duty. Then be indicted for war crimes.

Were the world of D.C. and the Pentagon not so awash in imperialist bloodlust and greed, it would be a given he would resign in disgrace. But given the current climate, he’ll probably be quietly forced out then make $500k a year working for a defense contractor.

It’s the system that is corrupt. It’s the system that must change.

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If you are an experienced user, you probably want Windows Automatic Updates either off or on “download updates but let me choose when to install them.” Then you can choose when to install them, as recent updates have in fact created serious problems for some. Let others beta-test the new patches for a few days before you install them.

Norton/Symantec Security, in its infinite brain-damaged wisdom, will try to turn Auto Updates back on and will tell you it’s a security risk if you don’t. Ignore it. Of all the security programs, Norton is by far the stupidest and most intrusive, and idiot features like this simply prove that.

To change auto updates, go to Control Panel/ Automatic Updates.

But wait, there’s more.

Security research firm eEye warned Thursday that a high-risk vulnerability exists within Symantec’s Norton AntiVirus 10.x that could allow for code execution. According to an advisory posted on eEye’s Web site, the flaw does not require any user interaction to be exploited.

Especially troubling is the fact that that after the vulnerability is exploited, a hacker gains access to a command shell. This means that the attacker would be able to perform just about any action, and opens up the possibility of a worm automatically infecting systems.

This from a program that is supposed to be protecting your system. That’s it. All Symantec programs are coming off our two remaining computers that still use them. Not only are their programs clueless, ponderously slow, and annoying, they are also dangerous.

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Probe finds Marines killed unarmed Iraqi civilians

Marines from Camp Pendleton wantonly killed unarmed Iraqi civilians, including women and children, and then tried to cover up the slayings in the insurgent stronghold of Haditha, military investigations have found.

Officials who have seen the findings of the investigations said the filing of criminal charges, including some murder counts, was expected, which would make the Nov. 19 incident the most serious case of alleged U.S. war crimes in Iraq.

Bring the troops home now. End the madness. And indict the senior officers under whose command this happened.

Corrupt politicians and CEOs. CIA torture prisons. Deliberate slaughter of children. This country is run by people who can only be described as deranged. We the people are the only ones who can change things. The politicians can’t do it because they are part of the problem. Other countries have had deranged leaders - and have replaced them. We can do it too.

Do something. Get invoved. Fight back. If you’re already involved, then fight back harder. This applies to me too!

The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.
–Dante Alighieri

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The flights are run by the highly secret CIA Counter Terrorist Intelligence Centre, CTIC, at Langley.

“If a strong psychological interrogation with some physical force is required, a detainee is flown to Jordan. If a suspect is to be interrogated in between periods of strong physical force, he is sent to Egypt. For the most severe of torture for information, he is sent to Uzbekistan where he is killed after he can reveal no more”, a senior Mossad officer said.

Craig Murray, when British ambassador to Uzbekistan, wrote in a memo to Jack Straw, Britain’s Foreign Secretary in November 2004: “The CIA chief in this country acknowledged to me that torture of those rendered includes the boiling in vats of prisoners”.

Those at CIA responsible for these atrocities should be in prison. And maybe one day they will be.

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The House Judiciary Committee today passed the Net neutrality bill proposed by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) by a 20-13 vote. The action represents the first legislative victory for the Net neutrality forces, which are pushing Congress to enact legislation that would prevent service providers from developing premium tiers of Internet content delivery with higher prices.

Yes, that Sensenbrenner…  And this is a big victory indeed.

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I use Microsoft FrontPage to build websites. The most recent version was released in 2003.

Here’s what’s replacing it, Microsoft Expression Web Designer, now available as a free beta download. More on my tech blog.

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