Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.

— Isaac Asimov

Today is the 25th anniversary of AIDS.  It’s ironic Republicans and conservatives have chosen this date to reinvigorate their war against homosexuals.  Is it any wonder the bill for the FMA is scheduled to hit the Senate floor tomorrow, 06/06/06?

Significant terror arrests in Canada.  And wow!  They had 3 tons of ammonium nitrate.  Only one ton was used for the Oklahoma City bombing, and look at the damage that did.  Now imagine what 3 tons could do.  These folks were going to do some real damage.

Dude, it’s the Fortress of Solitude!  Just look at these photos.  Fantastic!  The largest crystals on Earth — and they’re entirely natural.  It’s rather uninviting “as the temperature in the cave is over 150 degrees Fahrenheit with 100% humidity.”  They need to leave it that way.  Let them grow and develop naturally, and it’ll also keep people from spending too much time in there (notice that damage has already been done in nearby caves, so this needs especially critical protection from humans).  [via Matt]

I already mentioned a photo of Alaska’s newly erupted Cleveland Volcano.  But check out this photo (click on it for a larger version).  In a word: astounding!

It’s noctilucent cloud season again.  You can get viewing tips and see a gallery of photos over at SpaceWeather.com.

And Christians wonder why they think they’re at war with everyone else…  There really is a new video game where the point is “to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state – especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is ‘to conduct physical and spiritual warfare’; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice.”  The end goal?  “[T]o remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life.”  I’m going to be ill.

“The biggest armored dinosaur to be discovered so far was recently found in southern Utah, in a rugged badland just south of Green River.”  Cool.

You simply must read this OpEd by Andrew Sullivan.  It’s a page and a half, but it’s a significant piece from a conservative who really feels betrayed.

“This is not America.” Those words were President George W Bush’s attempt to explain the horrors of Abu Ghraib prison on the Arabic-language network Alhurra in 2004. He spoke the words as if they were an empirical matter, but a cognitive dissonance could be sensed through them.

If the men and women who tortured and abused and murdered at Abu Ghraib did not represent America, what did they represent? They wore the uniforms of the United States military. They were under the command of the American military. In the grotesque, grinning photographs they clearly seemed to believe that what they were doing was routine and approved.

And we now know from the official record that Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, had personally authorised the use of unmuzzled dogs to terrify detainees long before Abu Ghraib occurred, exactly as we saw in those photos. Does the secretary of defence not represent America?

Almost two years after the torture story broke Congress finally roused itself and passed an amendment to a defence appropriations bill by John McCain that forbade the use of any “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” of detainees by any American official anywhere in the world. It was passed by veto-proof margins and Bush signed it. But he appended a “signing statement” insisting that, as commander-in-chief, he retained the right to order torture if he saw fit.

And so on May 18 the nominee for CIA director, Michael Hayden, was asked directly by Senator Dianne Feinstein whether he regarded “waterboarding” as a legitimate interrogation technique. Hayden replied: “Let me defer that to closed session, and I would be happy to discuss it in some detail.”

Huh? Why a closed session? Isn’t the law crystal clear? Isn’t strapping a person to a board, tilting him so that his head is below his feet, and pouring water through a cloth into his mouth to simulate drowning a form of “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment? And isn’t that illegal? In America? Or is that not America either?

That’s only the beginning.  Please, go read it.  It’s damning and disturbing.

Then go read this piece also by Andrew Sullivan regarding Bush, military ethics, and Haditha et al.  This one is only three paragraphs and nicely supplements the previous article.

I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.

— James Thurber