Laughing At Danger

St. Paul, Minnesota: Dangerous

The raids in St. Paul are much more disturbing than I thought. Maybe I am slow on the news. I only found out about this at 1 a.m. last night, and it happened Friday night. Massive preemptive raids on peaceful protesters were conducted by local police in St. Paul, Minneosta, the only city where fire violations have become punishable by death in the event of resistance.

...members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff's department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than "fire code violations," and early this morning, the Sheriff's department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying. Jane Hamsher and I were at two of those homes this morning -- one which had just been raided and one which was in the process of being raided. Each of the raided houses is known by neighbors as a "hippie house," where 5-10 college-aged individuals live in a communal setting, and everyone we spoke with said that there had never been any problems of any kind in those houses, that they were filled with "peaceful kids" who are politically active but entirely unthreatening and friendly.

Video:


Watch yourselves, Jane and Glenn. The people in charge have no problems hurting innocent intellectuals. Be careful, and we will all hope for the best.
I won't miss things like this when I am gone.
I have found a lot more video and details, but it may be an hour or so (evac dial-up cpmmection).

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(I wrote this before I found Glenn's article)
Meanwhile, in suxville,
Reuters:

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered the city's more than 239,000 residents to evacuate on Sunday in the face of powerful Hurricane Gustav, which he called "the mother of all storms."

Actually, it's just a hurricane, but Mayor Nagin is the drag queen mother of all hypocrites.

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In unrelated news, a British criminal justice professor wrote a paper about cybercrime being exaggerated. He says it's all the doing of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. You see, Cory Doctorow, I told you there's nothing to worry about. People are just goosed over cyber/steam punk.

Placebo

Pure Morning

Did anybody ever believe St. Paul would be a great place to be during the RNC?
Bruce Sterling:

"The 'Welcoming Committee' is a criminal enterprise made up of 35 anarchists who are intent on committing criminal acts before and during the Republican National Convention," said Sheriff Bob Fletcher in a statement. "These acts include tactics to blockade and disable delegate buses, breaching venue security and injuring police officers. They have recruited assistance in their criminal conspiracy from other anarchists groups throughout the country. Through their plans and actions they have exhibited a blatant disregard for the law and the safety of others." (((Well, that makes the stakes pretty clear -- looking forward to the "Chicago-8" style hippie show-trial here.)))

Raid.
Dangerous kids, get off my lawn!

Slow Learner

I never saw this coming. Honest. Never. Raid:

"I heard somebody saying, 'They're coming, they're coming!' And feet pounding on the back stairs, pounding on the door saying they had a search warrant. They busted through the door. They've got their guns cocked at people." Sammy Schutz held tightly to five-year-old Gabe, who had been watching a video with his mother and father and about 20 other people when the police stormed into 827 Smith Avenue in St. Paul, ordering everyone down on the floor.

Down here we have Southern hospitality. We bake and serve cookies when the police come. They like them, we like them, no harm, no foul. Also, Santa Claus likes cookies too.

Late, Late Night: Follow The Leader

"You want me to be
Something I could never, ever be."
- Jon Davis

There's Thers Over Ther:

1. Partisan Democrat liberals run the teevee in manner of Evil Cabal or similar.
2. Saddam Hussein totally did too! have nukes and chemical weapons and WMDs.
3. Global Warming is a Fraud launched by False Prophet Scientists with sinister motives.
4. Homosexuals do not deserve equal marriage rights under the law for reasons of ickiness or something equally vague.
5. Barack Obama, like Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton, is a Marxist Communist. (Adding, Obama is an effete elitist latte & malt-liquor-swilling hardcore weenie gangsta rapper who wants to bang your sister, make everyone gay like him, & impose Islamofascism, because he's too smooth, too angry, too Ivy League and too South Side all at the same time.)
6. Torture is swell!
7. Despite its expensive pointlessness, we should drill drill drill! for oil that's not there that we need to wean ourselves off of anyhow.

They forgot that God created Earth 'cuz he was bored, women MUST have babies, child abuse was originally called discipline, the nigras are supposed to be working for them (not selling the crax), and, not least, Jesus loves you, brother/sister/mother/father/family.
I know. I know. I am gonna be sooo sorry when the rapture comes, because it's going to be very, very spooky after that.

Factoid:
Sarah Palin was 9 years old the last time John McCain had a natural stiffy, and John McCain was 23 years old when Alaska became a state.

Leighton Woodhouse, ladies and gentlemen:

I don't believe that this is a bid for Hillary supporters, I think it's a bid for the same segment of the electorate that almost every tactic from both campaigns has been aimed at: white working class swing voters. I think the inevitable attacks on Palin are part of the purpose of her selection. By turning her into a lightning rod, they will be able to deflect attacks away from McCain toward a far more sympathetic figure, and then use those attacks as evidence in a far more powerful counterattack against typical liberal elitism.

Does it count as an attack when I say she's hot?
And by hot I mean fine/foxy/groovy/dreamy/unqualified.

Manners are so last year.
Palin giggles while radio show host calls her Republican foe a bitch:

Gov. Sarah Palin really stepped in it when she appeared recently on the show hosted by two admiring radio personalities, Bob and Mark of KWHL.
Bob used the b-word to describe Sen. President Lyda Green, who is no friend of the governor. Instead of saying she objected to her supporter's making such a juvenile and inappropriate insult, she giggled nervously...
She came off looking immature herself, almost high-schoolish. It was conduct unbecoming a governor.

Full feed.

Does anyone believe that was an attack? I was actually hitting on her. I guess this means I got shot down. I bought a corsage for her and everything. Prom is ruined now.

Something smells horrid in this motel room. Damns yous hurricane! It smells like... old cheese.
Yawns.
More soon.

Morse Presents

Morse said I could steal this. My hero...


Sarah Palin factoids:
1. Sarah Palin loves earmarks, and loved the bridge to nowhere (between Ketchikan and Gravina, middle of nowhere). John McCain has said he is against them.

2. Some of her fellow Republican Alaskans are troubled by McCain's decision:

State Senate President Lyda Green said she thought it was a joke when someone called her at 6 a.m. to give her the news.

"She's not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?" said Green, a Republican from Palin's hometown of Wasilla. "Look at what she's done to this state. What would she do to the nation?"

Green, who has feuded with Palin repeatedly over the past two years, brought up the big oil tax increase Palin pushed through last year. She also pointed to the award of a $500 million state subsidy to a Canadian firm to pursue a natural gas pipeline that is far from guaranteed.

3. Sarah Palin wanted an exit strategy from Iraq. John McCain wants perpetual war everywhere, until the rapture comes or he dies.

4. Sarah Palin is hot, and the definition of is in this case is is. She's the first Republican politician I have ever wanted to "have relations with." Cindy botoxed herself into a coma, again, when she got a good look at Sarah. John McCatch-a-nut has been known to hanky panky (as with Cindy originally). Cindy Canes must be worried.

5. Feminists are not fooled:

Palin's addition to the ticket takes Republican faux-feminism to a whole new level. As Adam Serwer pointed out on TAPPED, this is in fact a condescending move by the GOP. It plays to the assumption that disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters did not care about her politics -- only her gender. In picking Palin, Republicans are lending credence to the sexist assumption that women voters are too stupid to investigate or care about the issues, and merely want to vote for someone who looks like them. As Serwer noted, it's akin to choosing Alan Keyes in an attempt to compete with Obama for votes from black Americans.

I hope Hillary takes her apart. Hillary should be he first woman President, not a homogenized baby factory from Alaska. It is indeed insulting, to women and admirers of Hillary Clinton alike.

Entire Cloud Deleted

Web based app data storage company FlexiScale had to shut down the entirety of it's service after a cloud engineer deleted an entire cloud. Here's what happened:

Following last month's much-discussed Amazon S3 outage, most (if not all) of XCalibre's FlexiScale cloud went dark on Tuesday, and nearly two days later, the UK-based hosting outfit has yet to restore service.

According to XCalibre CEO Tony Lucas, the outage has affected "a vast majority" of businesses relying on FlexiScale for on-demand storage, processing, and/or network bandwidth.

Lucas won't say how many cloud-happy outfits depend on his cloud, which went live in October. But he expects some of them will be back up and running this evening UK time. "And other customers will start coming back online from there on," he says. "But we're not sure how long that will take."

As Lucas explained in an email to customers - posted to the Web by CNet - the outage occurred when an XCalibre engineer accidentally deleted one of FlexiScale's main storage volumes. "The problem was caused by human error," Lucas told us. "We've been having some capacity issues - FlexiScale has been growing at about 30 per cent a month in terms of usage. We've been adding capacity and adding capacity and we were in the process of adding even more, when one of the engineers who was tidying things up on the disk architecture made a mistake."

The cons of clouds:
- Web 2.0 runs on a lot of extra money (it ain't free - you pay for services you already have [or should have] locally)
- If a cloud fails (God forbid, electronics still have flaws), you're screwed. Amazon EC2
went down, and all I got was this lousy email:

There was a bad hardware failure. Hope you backed up your shit.

Look at it this way: at least you don't have a tapeworm.

-The Amazon EC2 Team

Interesting to note, the U.S. DoD plans to move almost all of it's military computing to an HP cloud system. HP doesn't have half the experience in cloud engineering that Google has, and will certainly make a killing off the deal. Meanwhile, vast amounts of top secret intelligence will be stored and accessed remotely. What a great idea. The administration is really out thinking itself now. "We have lots and lots and lots of data... let's put it all in a cloud controlled by Hewlett Packard. Heh heh!"

There's no reason to worry about DDoS attacks or DNS hacking in the event of global war, right?
Also, the troops need more gear to lug around.
They'll all be cybernetic soon anyway.