April, 2009 archive
Greater Wingnuttery XVI 0
The hits just keep coming.
Evil in Our Name 0
Phillipe Sands writes of the torture memos in the Guardian:
When the memo was written, the administration had already fixed a policy of abuse, and the torture had already started. Lawyers were needed to provide the “golden shield” against prosecution. The memo did not benefit from the usual consultations; the many lawyers who would have objected were simply cut out of the process. A small group of lawyer-ideologues became participants in international crime, acts for which any state may, under the 1984 torture convention, exercise criminal jurisdiction. The evidence suggests complicity with the consequences that flowed from these flawed opinions – which went on to underpin CIA and military interrogations in Guantánamo, Iraq and beyond in the rendition programme.
(snip)
Obama is right not to target the interrogators in the sense that real responsibility lies much higher up. The senior lawyers and their patrons should derive little comfort from his intervention: they remain at risk of criminal investigation – or worse, in a legal black hole of their own making.
Google Servers 0
Most people buy computers one at a time, but Google thinks on a very different scale. Jimmy Clidaras revealed that the core of the company’s data centers are composed of standard 1AAA shipping containers packed with 1,160 servers each, with many containers in each data center.
Read about them at CNet.
Hiding the Evidence 0
Bloomberg:
With a May 4 deadline approaching, there is no set plan for how much information to release, how to categorize the results or who should make the announcements, people familiar with the matter said. While the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and other regulators want few details about the assessments to be publicized, the Treasury is pushing for broader disclosure.
MarketWatch has more.
More is better than less here. The public needs to know just how badly these Wall Street clowns have screwed up. Certainly, “consumer confidence” is not an issue. Consumers have no confidence.
No purpose other than clown preservation is served by concealing truth.
Dustbiter(s) 0
You can’t bank on it.
Not any more.
American Sterling Bank, Sugar Creek, MO
Must not have been sterling. Must have been plate.
Later: Another one bites the dust
Great Basin Bank of Nevada, Elko, NV
Masters of the Bleedin’ Universe. Free hand of the market my anatomy.
Brrring 0
Brendan gets a phone call.
Think There’s No Connection . . . 0
. . . between using hate and fear as political tactics and stuff like this?
Legitimizing hate legitimizes hate-fullness.
End the politics of hate.
Neither Snow nor Rain nor Dead of Night 1
Buildings, however are quite another matter (warning, short commercial at beginning):
Republican Fascination with Torture 0
John Cole on the Republican talking points:
I Wondered Why GM Still Makes Buicks 0
After all, they discontinued Oldsmobile and no one noticed (emphasis added):
One of the main reasons GM has pushed to keep Buick is its popularity in China, the people said. Sales surged almost tenfold from 2000 through last year to 280,255, consulting firm IHS Global Insight Inc. said. . . .
Buyers there coveted Buicks because they were the cars in which Communist Party leaders were chauffeured. Buick sells nine models in the world’s most-populous country, where dealerships include private clubs and other customer perks associated with higher-end luxury brands in the U.S.
Not only that, I learned from the first link that Chrysler discontinued Plymouth and I didn’t notice.
Twits on Twitter 0
Salespersons knocking at your door:
Already Home Depot Inc. has wished her luck painting her room, a medical company recommended its device for her ear infection, and a DJ told her to check out his single.
“I don’t want random people contacting me,” said Gard, 21, who lives in Clearwater, Florida. “Don’t try to sell yourself through my Twitter.”
(snip)
“It is starting to get out of control,” said Christopher Peri, founder of TwittFilter, a Web site that lets users restrict who can follow updates they post to Twitter. “The original value of Twitter is friends talking to friends. When someone says, ‘I’m going to pimp this product,’ it’s no longer a social media.”
The story goes on the discuss Twitter’s efforts to combat twit spam.
Criswell predicts that, if Twitter does not manage to control this, the whole damn thing will just collapse under the weight of marketing, which my old friend once defined as
what companies do when they can’t actually sell anything.
In Union There Is Strength 0
“We’re American seamen. We’re union members. We stuck together. We did our jobs.”
Via Oliver Willis.
I Thought Hilton Was Already in the Luxury Hotel Market 0
And what is a “luxury lifestyle hotel” as opposed to a “luxury hotel” anyway?
Weird:
(Major Snippage)
According to Starwood, the allegedly stolen information included strategic plans for creating a lifestyle luxury hotel brand, and enabled Hilton to launch its Denizen brand in nine months as opposed to three to five years.
(Must. Restrain. Impulse. To. Rant.)
If more companies paid more attention to providing good value for the money and less to “branding,” they and their customers would all be better off.
Evil in Our Name 0
Cop Runamuck 0
Dumb. Just dumb. Makes TSA’s fear of shampoo look profound:
But the tourists have said they had to return home to Vienna without their holiday pictures after two policemen forced them to delete the photographs from their cameras in the name of preventing terrorism.
