(no subject)
Bad news: Apparently medical tourism can help spread antibiotic resistant bacteria, including a strain of pneumonia that, once it progresses into a severe infection, seems not to be treatable with any known technology. I suppose the doctors just quarantine you and keep an eye on you until you get completely better or die.
"Bad but improving" news:
-After being jailed from age 18 to age 45, a Houston car thief turned jailhouse lawyer managed to dig up DNA evidence and prove that he was not one of the four black men who raped a white woman in Houston in 1983, and has been released. If you think Texas justice is reliable and not all that racist, or you universally disregard the claims of jailhouse lawyers, especially if they are admitted criminals, please read this story.
-In 2004, the FBI sent an ISP owner a National Security Letter, demanding that he turn over private info on one of his customers without a warrant, not contact a lawyer, and not tell anyone that the FBI had forced him to do so. He did contact a lawyer, and the ACLU, fought like hell for six years, and the FBI has finally allowed him to speak publicly about the case. Meanwhile, Obama is trying to extend Dubya's evil and stupid expansion of police powers, and specifically the FBI's NSLs.
Good (if inconsequential) news: Remember the fake trailer for The Shining that made it look all happy and inspiring, with Peter Gabriel's "Solsbury Hill"? Well now someone made a fake trailer in the style of Inception, for a somewhat less well respected movie. Inception really needs some mockery-- like The Matrix, it's a really good action movie that has no ideas that would impress anyone who's ever read a book for fun, and tries relentlessly to pretend that it does, and like The Matrix, if it goes unmocked enough for long enough, it could become a wildly overblown and overfunded blight on our whole pop culture.
"Bad but improving" news:
-After being jailed from age 18 to age 45, a Houston car thief turned jailhouse lawyer managed to dig up DNA evidence and prove that he was not one of the four black men who raped a white woman in Houston in 1983, and has been released. If you think Texas justice is reliable and not all that racist, or you universally disregard the claims of jailhouse lawyers, especially if they are admitted criminals, please read this story.
-In 2004, the FBI sent an ISP owner a National Security Letter, demanding that he turn over private info on one of his customers without a warrant, not contact a lawyer, and not tell anyone that the FBI had forced him to do so. He did contact a lawyer, and the ACLU, fought like hell for six years, and the FBI has finally allowed him to speak publicly about the case. Meanwhile, Obama is trying to extend Dubya's evil and stupid expansion of police powers, and specifically the FBI's NSLs.
Good (if inconsequential) news: Remember the fake trailer for The Shining that made it look all happy and inspiring, with Peter Gabriel's "Solsbury Hill"? Well now someone made a fake trailer in the style of Inception, for a somewhat less well respected movie. Inception really needs some mockery-- like The Matrix, it's a really good action movie that has no ideas that would impress anyone who's ever read a book for fun, and tries relentlessly to pretend that it does, and like The Matrix, if it goes unmocked enough for long enough, it could become a wildly overblown and overfunded blight on our whole pop culture.