Viewing Files on the Web Considered Possession? [Slashdot:]

Some scary ideas about how illegal porn could be downloaded to your computer and you would not know it. I guess I will clear my cache shortly.  10:03:52 PM    

Fragment of yellow fever virus may hold key to safer vaccine. An HHMI international research scholar and colleagues have identified the crucial bit of yellow fever virus that people's immune systems need to spot and quash the often-fatal, re-emerging disease. [EurekAlert! - Infectious and Emerging Diseases]

Yellow fever is still a killer, and in the same family as West Nile. Maybe this will help.  9:51:23 PM    

[Patrick]: "Things you've seen. Things you've, well--done." Sometimes, it doesn't matter that a bunch of other people have already blogged the same thing.

Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) reads an FBI agent's report, on conditions at Guantanamo Bay, into the minutes of the United States Senate:

Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report: "On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold....On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

This is your country. This is your people. This is your relatives. This is us.

From Reuters:

Delaware Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden asked Deputy Associate Attorney General J. Michael Wiggins whether the Justice Department had "defined when there is the end of conflict."

"No, sir," Wiggins responded.

"If there is no definition as to when the conflict ends, that means forever, forever, forever these folks get held at Guantanamo Bay," Biden said.

"It's our position that, legally, they can be held in perpetuity," Wiggins said.

This. Is. Who. We. Are. - Patrick Nielsen Hayden (electrolite@nielsenhayden.com) [Making Light]

There is no defined end to this conflict and anyone captured in it can be held in perpetuity, can be chained to a floor in a painful position, like some awful rendition of 'Cool Hand Luke.' That's right, the country is now run by 'Captain', whose feeling that we have a failure to communicate necessiates further abuse. Abuse that we can perform in perpetuity because this conflict will never end. This is just the start. We are only 3 years into this sort of behavior. What will we be after 10 years of this? Many more years of this Strother Martin approach to governing and we will look like the Southern prison he controlled.   6:49:09 PM