…the point of these scolds’ political strategy — and it is a political strategy, despite some of its adherents’ quasireligiosity — is clear enough. It is not merely to demonize gays and the usual rogue’s gallery of secularist bogeymen for any American ill but to clear the Bush administration of any culpability for Abu Ghraib, the disaster that may have destroyed its mission in Iraq. If porn or MTV or Howard Stern can be said to have induced a “few bad apples” in one prison to misbehave, then everyone else in the chain of command, from the commander-in-chief down, is off the hook. If the culture war can be cross-wired with the actual war, then the buck will stop not at the Pentagon or the White House but at the Paris Hilton video, or “Mean Girls,” or maybe “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”

+ From an opinion article in The New York Times by FRANK RICH entitiled It Was the Porn That Made Them Do It. His premise is that the spin doctors may be shooting to absolve American soldiers and the chain of command via porn and a culture gone askew. -what he states, but perhaps not strong enough, is what this spin would mask over. People in the chain of command gave these soldiers license and influenced the direction their behaviour went. [via: Kirstie]

+ Loyola University has received approval to investigate PolyHeme�’s use as a blood substitute for critically injured and bleeding trauma patients at accident scenes. Blood has a very short shelf life, requires refrigeration, and matching types takes too much time too carry blood in ambulances. The blood substitute has a long shelf life and is compatible with all blood types. It’s designed to furnish oxygen which will “prevent organ damage in the brain, heart, lungs, liver and kidneys,” until a transfusion can be done at the hospital. - pretty damn cool. I hope it works. [cross-posted on Metafilter]

+ Rumsfeld has banned camera phones from the military. Why? The obvious reason is to protect his ass from more evidence leaking of his secret operations, “known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green”, to extract intelligence from Iraqis using “physical coercion and sexual humiliation”. - just thought I should post that, since at 3am Pacific time, only two US news agencies, Yahoo and The Washington Times, have picked up the story…

+ And now we learn of an Iraqi scientist’s murder after being held for 10 months. Dr Mohammed Munim was killed by a blow to the back of his head from a blunt instrument. The military report states that he died of ‘brainstem compression’. “The death certificate provided by the coalition, which is almost entirely blank, fails to explain how he got a fracture in his skull, or the small cut above his left eye. The scientist is merely a number, 1909.” Dr. al-Izmerly’s daughter Rana told the Guardian “The evidence is clear. It suggests the Americans killed him and then tried to hide what they had done. I will hate Americans and British people for the rest of my life. You are democrats. You said you were coming to bring democracy, and yet you kill my father. By accepting your governments, you accept what they do here in Iraq. ” - Is that a sound argument? Any American citizen who accepts their government is complicit in the atrocities of Iraq…

+ 1:33am. Listening to Soundmatic Radio which is currently playing a Selim Cenkil mix. On site the featured artist is Barish Turker who’s bio talks about spinning with Yunus Guvenen and other Turkish Djs in Istanbul. Cool. Finally I find another radiostation I like besides frisky that plays progressive. Listen. [via: Shoutcast].
+ update/11am: this is a station to bookmark for sure. excellent music!

+ Opposition research smeared Gore in the 2000 election campaign, and now it will attempt to smear Kerry in the current election campaign. Opposition research is used to bolster an election campaign by utilizing a room full of professional researchers running queries on anything and everything that comes out of the opposition’s camp. The idea being to find holes and weaknesses that can be exploited via media manipulation. It’s not a new method of campaigning, but…

What was remarkable about the 2000 effort was the degree to which the process advanced beyond what Barbara Comstock, who headed the RNC research team, calls “votes and quotes”—the standard campaign practice of leaving the job of scouting the target to very junior staff members, who tend to dig up little more than a rival’s legislative record and public statements. Comstock’s taking over the research team marked a significant change. She was a lawyer and a ten-year veteran of Capitol Hill who had been one of Representative Dan Burton’s top congressional investigators during the Clinton scandals that dominated the 1990s: Filegate, Travelgate, assorted campaign-finance imbroglios, and Whitewater. Rather than amass the usual bunch of college kids, Comstock put together a group of seasoned attorneys and former colleagues from the Burton Committee, including her deputy, Tim Griffin. “The team we had from 2000,” she told me recently, to show the degree of ratcheted-up professionalism, “were veteran investigators from the Clinton years. We had a core group of people, and that core was attorneys.”

Comstock combined a prosecutor’s mentality with an investigator’s ability to hunt through public records and other potentially incriminating documents. More important, she and her team understood how to use opposition research in the service of a larger goal: not simply to embarrass Gore with hard-to-explain votes or awkward statements but to craft over the course of the campaign a negative “storyline” about him that would eventually take hold in the public mind. “A campaign is a lot like a trial,” Comstock explained. “You want people aggressively arguing their case.”

[via: Arts & Letters Daily].

+ Listening to Noizetest, a shoutcast stream of ?? (varied house and trance and stuff..). I used whois to discover the noizetest domain owner’s email address to suggest that streaming a mix and posting a playlist would be nice, or better yet streaming a playlist. Either way it’s a disappointment to hear so many great tracks and not be able to search out more from their creators.
+update: an hour or so into the set the focus was lost, my interest flattened, then dwindled so much I went back to shoutcast.

+ “Two-thirds of American adults are overweight, and half of these are obese. Overweight means having a body mass index, or BMI, of 25 or greater, obese, 30 or greater: to calculate BMI, a widely used measure, take the square of your height in inches and then divide your weight, in pounds, by that number; then multiply the result by 703. Or calculate it on-line. ”
[from a quite long, thouroughly informative Harvard Magazine piece on obesity with nicely developed sociolgical, political, historical, and biological perspectives.][also via: Arts & Letters Daily].

Just updated my web browser to version 7.50. Loving it. I’ve been using Opera as my browser of choice for a few years and totally disregarded the mouse gesture recognition feature. What a shmuck! Mouse gesture recognition is ideal for power surfing. You simply hold down the right mouse button and move the mouse left, right, up, down or a combination of two. So for example, instead of clicking the [x] to close a page, all I do is hold the button down and move my mouse down and right. I barely move it more than a twitch and the page closes. Wicked! There are quite a few navigation commands. In google all I do is hold the button down and move to the right and the next page opens. Of course that works for other webpages too.

+ Was thinking that, since gas is so out-of-fucking-control-expensive, that I wanted to find VancouverGasPrices.com, the site where people daily post the cheapest local gas prices on. [link thanks to FactoVision]

+ More and more information is coming out that filesharing is innocent of the accusations made by the RIAA and CRIAA. There was not a 7% decrease in music sales last year. Quite the contrary, there was a 10% increase. If the logic was to infer that filesharing was responsible for the untrue losses, then filesharing should be inferred to be responsible for the true gains. [also via: FactoVision]

+ Who do I know that might find interesting the prediction of a boom in demand for home theatre furinture…

+ In April the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued three “guidances” and one directive that probably spells the end to consumer confidence in the USDA’s own organic certification program. The changes will allow, in contradiction to sense, the use of antibiotics on organic dairy cows and synthetic pesticides on organic farms. [via metafilter]

Erotic photos by Rene Whitfield.

+ Corinna Holthusen’s latest works follow the trend of making creepy things pretty.

+ ‘Pssst,’ Wanna see pink pee? - ha, ha, ha. [both links via: AttuSeesAll]

+ Nerve has an article titled sex advice from Djs. I read it. I don’t know any of the Djs, assuming by inference that they’re local to New York. Anyways. It’s kind of okay reading. [via: World Sex news]

+ - as if I’d pay to look at porn- There’s a pay site I stumbled across, from Norway/Sweden, that’s called Fuck For Forest. - It’s an environmental site that puts all it’s profits to saving the rainforest. Sex and Politics, isn’t that a no-no?

+ Spock photographs naked women!! Star Trek legend Leoanard Nimoy published a book of nudes in 2002 entitled Shekhina which is the name of the feminine presence of God to Jews. Stands to reason that it caused a bit of scandal in the Jewish community. He approached a Ballet company, Elisa Monte Dance, with the idea to produce the same named ballet which ran in February 2004. The guy’s in his 70’s. Shouldn’t he be photographing flowers… [also via: World Sex news]

+ Shoe Porn. - hot fucking shoes! [via: Eros Blog]