On the 14th of December, 2011, the House of Representatives of these United States voted in favor of indefinite military detention, without charges, of any American, anywhere, anytime, without due process of law, at the discretion of the government alone.


Final Vote 283-136 Lets start with those members of Congress who voted NO:  (Democrats in italic)




The Senate voted Tuesday, December 13.  The vote was 86-13. Here are the Senators who voted NO:
Cardin (D-MD)
Coburn (R-OK)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
Durbin (D-IL)
Franken (D-MN)
Harkin (D-IA)
Lee (R-UT)
Merkley (D-OR)
Paul (R-KY)
Risch (R-ID)
Sanders (I-VT)
Wyden (D-OR)

 The rest of the blackguards can be found here and here.


How did this happen? 
"this appears to be one of those issues that escapes the kind of public attention (read: outrage) it deserves because of a dismaying lack of information and discussion in the mainstream media, as well as some spin on the part of supportive legislators and a sneaky timeline for the voting process: just in time for the holidays!" truthdig.com

The bill was drafted in secret:

The US Senate Armed Forces Committee, led by Carl Levin (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ), held a secret closed door session to insert ominous new Federal powers into the Defense Authorization Bill. This is the annual bill to fund the US military. These new powers were requested by the Obama administration.

Because people couldnt be bothered to read about what was happening and make their voices be heard.  Because the media failed to inform them:  That as US troops were leaving Iraq, the battleground was moving to the United States.

“The homeland is part of the battlefield and people can be held without trial whether an American citizen or not,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, one of the key backers of the new authority.

Section 1031 of the NDAA bill, describes the U.S. as a "battlefield" and would give the military a green light to arrest and detain American citizens without any charges or trial.

How did this happen?

The most popular headline is false:























The true story is in the extended coverage, behind the false story:


But digging a layer deeper into the news is for someone who is genuinely interested in Obama's complete reversal on "enemy combatants" and "infinite detention" and "without trial," suspension of habeas corpus and Bush's AUMF.  I don't know who writes headlines... but my impression is these writers are given an article and told by editors to "sex this up."  Like when Liz Taylor passed away the headline was, "Paul Newman says Liz was one helluva gal," when Newman had been dead for more than a year.

So the lead headline is the one hit on most often, the false one.

Is Google evil?  Or have the humanoids at Google been taken over by their own algorithms?


Kevin Slavin How Algorithms Shape Our World

EMERAC begins to smoke and spew

Ordinarily on boot up my Dell hard disk sounds the first two notes of the Dennis the Menace theme. 

Yesterday it was groaning and heaving loudly,




















but still working long enough so I could find this solution.  Diagnosis: bad clusters.  And then I watched as my computer performed surgery on itself.  Now it is eerily silent, but cured.  This diagnosis and repair took a coupla hours.



How to run Chkdsk from Windows Explorer

1. Double-click My Computer, and then right-click the hard disk that you want to check.
2. Click Properties, and then click Tools.
3. Under Error-checking, click Check Now. A dialog box that shows the Check disk options is displayed,
4. • To repair errors, locate bad sectors, and recover readable information, select the Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors check box, and then click Start.
   Note If one or more of the files on the hard disk are open, you will receive the following message:
   The disk check could not be performed because the disk check utility needs exclusive access to some Windows files on the disk. These files can be accessed by restarting Windows. Do you want to schedule the disk check to occur the next time you restart the computer?
   Click Yes to schedule the disk check, and then restart your computer to start the disk check.

I'm sure there is some sci fi story about this...??

The curator Francesco Bonami, who has written a partly fictional, and biting, unauthorized account of Cattelan’s career, was more circumspect. “At the Guggenheim, the art always has to compete with the building,” he said. “Does the museum win or does the art? We’ll see.”  nytblog nov 4 2011
(you'll notice in this installation all the art-defying walls are empty)

A show whose principle emotion is spite also has the the gee-wiz fun of a giant Calder mobile. Cattelan manages the brilliant, paradoxical trick of making “institutional critique,” as such museum-prodding work is known, into a blockbusting crowd pleaser.  the daily beast nov 4 2011

"I think in the Guggenheim Frank Lloyd Wright was saying 'Screw you, New York.'" Crap Mariner