WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers security clearance.

The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax Wednesday to Democratic Rep. Maurice Hinchey of New York saying it was closing its inquiry because without clearance it could not examine department lawyers' role in the program.

How outrageous. Here's the summary as I see it :

The Press : "The Prez is spying on you, but it's pretty much cool. He said it's ok, because, you know, war. Some people are pissed, but, whatever."

The People : "Um, what? Is that alright? Oh, American Idol time..."

The Prez : "What's wrong with you people? I'm 'protecting you'. The 'Constitution' shouldn't stand in the way of that, should it?"

The DOJ : "Ok, we're gonna investigate... this is wack."

The NSA : "Um, no. No, we think it'd be altogether better if you went back to the office and had a coffee. We'll be over here doing whatever we want."

The DOJ : "But... oh, ok, whatever. I *am* tired, lets get some Grande Mocha's."

The People : "*snore*"

CNN.com - Domestic spying inquiry killed - May 10, 2006

Why the anger? It can be summed up in one run-on sentence: We have lost two towers in New York, a part of the Pentagon, an important American city called New Orleans, our economic solvency, our global reputation, our moral authority, our children's future, we have lost tens of thousands of American soldiers to death and grievous injury, we must endure the Abramoffs and the Cunninghams and the Libbys and the whores and the bribes and the utter corruption, we must contemplate the staggering depth of the hole we have been hurled down into, and we expect little to no help from the mainstream DC press, whose lazy go-along-to-get-along cocktail-circuit mentality allowed so much of this to happen because they failed comprehensively to do their job.

George W. Bush and his pals used September 11th against the American people, used perhaps the most horrific day in our collective history, deliberately and with intent, to foster a war of choice that has killed untold tens of thousands of human beings and basically bankrupted our country. They lied about the threat posed by Iraq. They destroyed the career of a CIA agent who was tasked to keep an eye on Iran's nuclear ambitions, and did so to exact petty political revenge against a critic. They tortured people, and spied on American civilians.

You cannot fathom anger arising from this?

A fabulous rebuttal to Cohen's quite honestly absurd arguments from a few days ago.

William Rivers Pitt | An Open Letter to Richard Cohen

Our tools are very powerful. It's almost like they're too powerful. If you give people this huge beautiful blank canvas, where do they start?

Conceptually, I kind of like their point of view, but it doesn't seem useful to me. Then, I don't have a MySpace profile either.

Imeem has replicated, it appears, the functionality of Blogger, Flickr, a few other web services and, of course, IM. They apparently use a custom IM application to connect with the various IM services, which is going to mean getting people to switch from iChat, AIM, Trillian, etc. That may be the most challenging thing for them.

I'm skeptical of convergence as a rule, but perhaps it will appeal to people who'd rather not have to manage multiple logins and so forth, I don't know. To me, it seems like trying to be everything is a good way to do a lot of things poorly.

imeem: IM-Based Social Networking

BELIEVING that God created the universe in six days is a form of superstitious paganism, the Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno claimed yesterday.

Brother Consolmagno, who works in a Vatican observatory in Arizona and as curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Italy, said a "destructive myth" had developed in modern society that religion and science were competing ideologies.

[ Emphasis mine. Thank you Brother... nice to get support from the clergy on this one. -k]

Scotsman.com News - International - Creationism dismissed as 'a kind of paganism' by Vatican's astronomer

The first images have turned up from Electroma, the first cinematic effort from the electronic music duo Daft Punk. A press release briefly described the story as follows, except in French:

Daft Punk' s Electroma is visual and musical which follows the history of two robots in their search to become human.

To make things more bizarre, the film contains no dialogue, only music, allowing the images of bondage robots to speak for themselves. While fans of the musicians have expressed a great deal of interest in the film, they're still way more excited about glowing, flashing jewelry and pacifiers.

Fuck yeah! I mean, this could be total art-wankery or it could be super cool like Interstella 5555, but I'm looking forward to it anyway.

I Watch Stuff! - Daft Punk's Electroma Stills

Some challenging e-mail about that item came from Dennis Moran, assistant business editor of the Prague Post. "English borrows copiously if incompletely," he wrote, noting such Associated Press style preferences as "referendums" and "stadiums" (not the Latin plurals "referenda" and "stadia"). Amen to those, and to "curriculums," rather than the pompous "curricula" still widely favored in academic circles.

I disagree for two reasons.

1. I don't think the change came about as a result of bringing those originally borrowed words into line with standard English pluralization rules. I understand the argument for doing so, since English becomes muddy if we start having to apply foreign (or extinct) rules to all borrowed words. In other words, even though "stadium" comes to us from latin, it's not latin anymore, it's english, and should be treated as such when pluralized (thus, "stadiums"). Nonetheless, I don't hear that argument directly. Rather, I hear that the changes are to prevent confusion (which, yes, indirectly argues against confusing additional rules) but I'm generally against modifying language to cater to ignorance. Call me elitist, but I think it's preferable to keep usages that have long been in practice, but require some education of the reader. I can't help being plagued by visions of "lite" replacing "light" because "gosh, the 'gh' is confusing and 'lite' is more common". This sends me into fits of apoplexy.

2. It sounds dumb. A trailing 'ms' is inelegant and unpleasant to say. "The referenda were universally rejected." flows so much better than "The referendums were ..." Perhaps I'm giving my inner aesthete too much rein, but I think elegance is worth preserving in language.

Am I expected to contemplate "datums" or should we just decide to allow everyone to use "data" as if it were singular?

Never.

Language Corner: Graffito/Graffiti

It may have been just a typo, but it pops up from time to time: "Such reports seem born out by help-wanted advertising..." The correct spelling is "borne," with an "e." It's one of two past participles of "to bear," meaning (a) to give birth or (b) to carry. The one without the "e" is used for actual or figurative birth: a star is born, to a born loser; things are born of necessity or desperation; children are born out of wedlock. For everything else, including the cited form of "bear out," meaning to prove or confirm, add the "e."

Yes, dammit, yes! Misuse of born/borne is a pet peeve of mine.

Language Corner: Borne Out, with an

This is the complete opinion of Justice Mann. If you've been following this case (for 20 years), it's an interesting read.

Some highlights, starting with the one i found most crucial

This is ultimately a matter of impression. I must look at the mark with the eyes of a reasonable and sensible user and determine what impression would be given. Such a user would be familiar with the notion of buying recordings of creative works from a retailer, and would be capable of not seeing any other association between retailer and the music other than that arising out of the sale itself. That is what happens in shops. The same user would be likely to be familiar (at least nowadays) with other download services (for example Napster, or Real) where downloads of similar material are available and where the service's logo features on the webpages from which the downloads take place, or within the downloading window. In my view the presence of a logo which is the logo of the download service would not be likely to be taken by such a user, without more, as a sort of trade association with the content beyond that of being a retailer. That is not, in my view, the sort of association that falls within the TMA. A retailer offers goods which have originated from others, very often under the mark of others. In doing so, and in advertising his sales service by the copious use of his own mark, he does not suggest that the goods are his in terms of trade origin or trade source, particularly if the originator's mark is used.

The judge effectively states that the Apple Computer logo can't reasonably be construed to be applied to the music content itself.

On the matter of establishing the baseline for addressing the claimed breaches

Before deciding whether any given acts are breaches it is necessary to ascertain what the TMA means. The parties do not agree about this, and I can summarise the arguments of the parties as follows. In fairness, this summary does not do justice to some of the subtleties of the arguments, but an outline suffices for present purposes. Both parties submitted that the position is simple and straightforward, which is a pretty good indication that it is not.

Emphasis mine... i thought that was telling, and humorous.

Lastly, and this has no real bearing, but I found it interesting, the Judge lightly castigates Apple Corps manager Aspinall, saying,

He professed not to be a technical man, and professed no affinity with computers whatsoever. I think that he sought to portray himself as somewhat more naïve about and ignorant about technological issues than is really the case. I do not consider that he can have successfully carried out his job for as many years as he has held it had he been quite as distanced from these things as he sought to portray in the witness box. While I accept that basically he is not a technical man (and there is no reason why he should be) I think him capable of a greater grasp of these things than he wished to demonstrate.

Ha!

Of course, Apple Corps has pledged to appeal, which is expected, but at any rate, and all Mac love aside, I think this appears to be a reasonable decision, and I hope it stands.

Apple Corps v Apple Computer: judgment in full - Law - Times Online

Colbert's real sin wasn't lese majesty, it was inserting a brief moment of honesty into an event based upon a lie -- one considered socially necessary by the political powers that be, but still, a lie.

Like its upscale sibling, the annual Gridiron Club dinner, the White House Correspondents dinner is a ritual designed, at least implicitly, to showcase the underlying unity of our Beltway elites. It's supposed to demonstrate that no matter how ferocious their battles may appear on the surface, political opponents can still gather in the same room and break bread, with the corporate media acting as the properly neutral host. It's a relic of the good old days of centrism and bipartisan log rolling ("the end of ideology"), visible proof that in the American system, there may be enemies, but there are no mortal enemies. And so last night we had Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame sitting at one table, Karl Rove at another, and no knives were drawn.

Another good analysis, this time by billmon...

The Blog | Billmon: American Nightmarez | The Huffington Post

Sometimes, if you're lucky as a historian, you find a bit of evidence which illuminates a big idea. That happened to me this week in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge.

The thought uppermost in my mind was how odd it is that non-scientists think of science as being about certainties and absolute truth. Whereas scientists are actually quite tentative - they simply try to arrive at the best fit between the experimental findings so far and a general principle.

The manuscript I found was a ship's journal kept by a 17th Century English sea captain, who had offered to carry some state-of-the-art scientific equipment on a voyage to the west coast of Africa and back - two new pendulum clocks.

[ Not a bad article, but not great either. I think the author was unclear in places and not quite in front of the argument, as I see it.

-k]

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Believe it or not: The battle over certainty