This cartoon about drinking alcohol is too good not to share.

Get all the photos, videos, and news about NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn right here.  There’s some really spectacular stuff to see (just check out that first animated image of the Saturnian moon ballet for an example).

The 37th Skeptics’ Circle comes to you from the Bermuda Triangle.  Great presentation full of a lot of good critical thinking.

I and the Bird #26 is a nod to World Cup fever.  You’ll find a lot of good avian news and photography in this carnival, so fly on over.

Tangled Bank #56 brings together the best science writing from across all disciplines.  This is a great carnival.

Yet another “missing link” found in the evolutionary chain; this time, it’s literally for the birds.  Modern evolutionary synthesis has made tremendous progress in the last few years by way of the discovery of many transitional fossils (missing links).  It is now impossible for anyone with an iota of sense to argue against evolution — except the clueless and faithfully ignorant, of course, who allow arbitrary commitments of mental energy (aka “faith”) to cloud and distort truth.

The National Academies of Science now say there is “high confidence” that Earth is the warmest it’s been in 400 years.  Regardless of cause, global warming is a reality of the climate change we see happening all over the planet.  There is only one question to ask: What are you going to do about it?

If this is true, it’s more than disturbing: Is America sending back corpses from Guantánamo Bay that are missing vital internal organs making impossible proper identification of the causes of death?  What reason would we have for removing “major bodily organs such as the heart, the kidneys, livers and the blood vessels”?  And, more importantly, despite being reported in several sources overseas, why have we not heard about it?  If true…

Yes, let’s consider passing a constitutional amendment to outlaw burning the flag even though President Bush has no problem defacing the same.  Take a look; it’s already against the law to do what he did, but he’s demonstrating yet another “do as I say and not as I do” infringement of our rights.  You can’t argue with the photo or the US Code cited.  Can you say “hypocrisy”?

I warned you about the new suspend-all-of-your-rights-and-liberties label otherwise known as “enemy combatant”.  Using this ingenious retardation of American ideology and abstract violation of our Constitution, “[Jose] Padilla was designated an ‘enemy combatant’ and held for 3 1/2 years without charge by the Bush administration shortly after his May 2002 arrest. He was accused then of plotting to detonate a radioactive ‘dirty bomb’ in a major U.S. city.”  Despite being an American citizen, he was held without arraignment, counsel, or rights until being “added as a defendant in the Miami terror support cell case last year amid a legal struggle over President Bush’s authority to hold him indefinitely.”

The government would not charge him.  They would not face him in a court of law to substantiate their accusations and defend their right to violate all of his constitutional liberties and protections (remember, he’s an American citizen).  Now they can’t even present enough evidence to convince a judge that he might be possibly related to the terrorism charges to which he was eventually linked when the Feds realized his illegal and unconstitutional detention on the dirty bomb charges would likely be overturned by a federal judge.

Lacking sufficient evidence to even suggest a terrorism link to the seemingly imaginary dirty bomb plot, our government chose to submerge his case in a different terrorism accusation in Florida.  That “indictment does not mention the ‘dirty bomb’ allegations.”  Apparently there was no way to convince anyone that was true or even a reasonable suspicion.

Randomly thrown into this completely separate case unrelated to his detention and the suspension of his rights as an American, another judge has challenged the government “prosecutors to turn over more evidence to back up allegations that Jose Padilla and two co-defendants conspired to kill, injure or kidnap people overseas as part of a global Islamic terrorist network.”  Unconvinced by the indictment which she called “very light on facts”, U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke requested more information because there appeared to be nothing substantial that could link any of the defendants to acts of terrorism or victims thereof.

Assistant U.S. attorney Brian Frazier, when questioned about the victims or intended targets of the hypothetical terrorism plot, said, “What is terrorism but a random act of violence? It means anyone could be a victim at any time.”  The government is apparently saying that they can claim you want to hurt someone somewhere at some unspecified time, and that we must accept this vacuous proclamation as unambiguous and unarguable.  I suppose, as long as they officially tagged you with the “enemy combatant” moniker, this logic dictates we should not argue or question the evidence.

This is the country we live in, poppets.  It is the new world order for America.  If someone says you’re a bad person and a danger to the rest of us, your rights get thrown out the window, the impetus to provide evidence against you is unnecessary in order to hold you indefinitely, lacking the ability to convince anyone you might be guilty of an accusation does not hinder you from subsequently being held on completely unrelated charges which also are unsubstantiated and unconvincing, and it takes but a single label arbitrarily applied by an unseen and unchallenged person for you to become a nameless, faceless enemy “rendered” less than human, less than deserving of the rights to which you as an American can rightfully lay claim, and forever relegated to the extra-constitutional process now in place for this McCarthyist accusation-is-all-you-need system of justice.

The installation of site and server updates later today may cause a few hiccups, so be warned.  I don’t think there will be any major outages or problems excepting a quick reboot of the server.  Just an FYI…

Why?  Because AT&T revamped its privacy policy so that it clearly states your personal information no longer belongs to you and they can do with it as they please.  To wit:

AT&T has issued an updated privacy policy that takes effect Friday. The changes are significant because they appear to give the telecom giant more latitude when it comes to sharing customers’ personal data with government officials.

The new policy says that AT&T — not customers — owns customers’ confidential info and can use it “to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.”

The policy also indicates that AT&T will track the viewing habits of customers of its new video service — something that cable and satellite providers are prohibited from doing.

Moreover, AT&T (formerly known as SBC) is requiring customers to agree to its updated privacy policy as a condition for service — a new move that legal experts say will reduce customers’ recourse for any future data sharing with government authorities or others.

Not only are they in bed with the NSA’s illegal and unconstitutional domestic spying, even going so far as to build special rooms at their major data and network centers for the government to “plug and spy”, but now they are removing the restrictions in their own policies that made such actions illegal in the first place.

It’s time to find a different carrier for my cell phone, internet, and local and long-distance phone service.  What a pain.