Elephant talk

--Lost in Translation (no, not the movie). Found on William Gibson's dead blog. Jeez, I've been doing this manually for some time now. Obviously I need to waste more time surfing.

--If America's version of Big brother were like the UK's, I'd watch it.

--The Rutan brother's White Knight has been doing test flights in the Mojave desert, and is scheduled to make the first private manned space flight this Monday. I'm a little disappointed, in that Rutan told a crowd at the Oshkosh air show last year that he would make the first flight from there. Oh, well. At least we're finally taking space flight out of the exclusive hands of the government.

--Yet another example that we are turning into the country that does things we used to think only other countries did--countries that we were told are Evil. The US is now officially in the business of "disappearing" its enemies. Donald Rumsfeld even signed the memo ordering it.

Admittedly, this most recent example is nothing new; American citizens and civilian citizens of other countries have regularly been "disappeared" to Guantanamo Bay for a few years now. This, however, is different in that it blatantly violates the Geneva Convention. Of course, Bushco doesn't believe that the Geneva code applies to them.

--BTW, here is the memorandum that the Justice Department wrote up giving the White House legal go-ahead to torture prisoners. This is the one Ashroft has refused to turn over to the Senate committee investigating the atrocities, thus putting himself in contempt of congress. But then, contempt of congress is nothing new for this administration.