"If you understood everything I said, you'd be me" - Miles Davis
"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees" - George W. Bush
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell
"Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government." - Lenny Bruce
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!" - Homer Simpson
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we" - George W. Bush
Utility Fog Banner

  Habeus Corpus
"A federal district judge in South Carolina ruled Monday that President Bush had greatly overstepped his authority by detaining an American citizen as an enemy combatant for nearly three years without filing criminal charges.

The judge, Henry F. Floyd, ruled that the government must release the American, Jose Padilla, within 45 days from the military brig in Charleston, S.C., where he has been held since June 2002. That left the Bush administration time to appeal, and a Justice Department spokesman, John Nowacki, said officials immediately decided to do so.

In his opinion, Judge Floyd sharply criticized the administration's use of the enemy combatant designation in Mr. Padilla's case.

"The court finds that the president has no power, neither express nor implied, neither constitutional nor statutory, to hold petitioner as an enemy combatant," Judge Floyd wrote.

The judge said he had no choice but to reject the president's claim that he had the power to detain Mr. Padilla, who was arrested in May 2002 at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago and was later accused of having planned to detonate a radiation-spewing "dirty bomb" in the United States as part of a plot by Al Qaeda.

"To do otherwise would not only offend the rule of law and violate this country's constitutional tradition," Judge Floyd wrote, "but it would also be a betrayal of this nation's commitment to the separation of powers that safeguards our democratic values and individual liberties."

Judge Floyd, who was nominated to the court by President Bush in May 2003, said that to agree with the president would "be to engage in judicial activism," a phrase often used by the White House to criticize rulings with which it disagrees."
Link


  Ignomious
I know Hootie has earned his place in Hell, but it's kind of sad to see him all dolled up in a cowboy suit doing Burger King commercials.

  Two Of The Basic Blog Food Groups
Bacontarian
Garlicster

  Ras Science
Robot Reggae Ukelele
Via Music Thing

  Think Big
"This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity. I can in no way guarantee the complete extinction of the human race via any of these methods, real or imaginary. Humanity is wily and resourceful, and many of the methods outlined below will take many years to even become available, let alone implement, by which time mankind may well have spread to other planets; indeed, other star systems. If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.

This is a guide for those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore.

Mission statement

For the purposes of what I hope to be a technically and scientifically accurate document, I will define our goal thus: by any means necessary, to render the Earth into a form in which it may no longer be considered a planet. Such forms include, but are most definitely not limited to: two or more planets; any number of smaller asteroids; a quantum singularity; a dust cloud."
How to destroy the Earth
Via Viridian Mailing List

  HST Quotes
"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. "What the hell are you yelling about?" he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. "Never mind," I said. "It's your turn to drive." I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough. - Opening to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1972, in which HST begins his "savage journey to the heart of the American dream"

We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers ... Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls ... not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked in a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can ... - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

George W Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world. We didn't vote for these cheap, greedy little killers who speak for America today - and we will not vote for them again in 2002. Or 2004. Or ever. Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? - Kingdom of Fear, 2003

At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on the one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going. - Paul Kemp, The Rum Diary, 1959, published 1998

The Edge ... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. - Hell's Angels, 1965

I have learned a few tricks along the way, a few random skills and simple avoidance techniques- but mainly it has been luck, I think, and a keen attention to karma, along with my natural girlish charm. - Last paragraph of Kingdom of Fear, 2003

He shrugged. "Well, we don't ask for nothin but the truth. Like I say, there's not much good that you can write about us, but I don't see where that gives people the right to just make up stuff ... all this bullshit, hell, ain't the truth bad enough for em?" - Hell's Angels

To hell with Fun. I shit on the chest of Fun. Look what it did to Charles Manson. He had Too much fun - no doubt about that - so they put him away for life. - Kingdom of Fear

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me. - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

O Ghost, O Lost, Lost and Gone, O Ghost, come back again. - Kingdom of Fear"
Link
Via The BigMoboDaddy

  R.I.P. HST Poster
RIP HST
Via Eyebeam Reblog

  He's Cute, He's Evil, And He Smells Like Cinnamon
Hell-o Satan
Via Bifurcated Rivets

  Gonzo
Good HST site: Link
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
All Things Considered had a nice piece on Hunter today, at least untitl they finished it by saying {paraphrase} "most of all he was fun to read". I'd hope Thompson is remembered as more than an entertainer.
Via Boing Boing

  Free Arash and Mojtaba
committee to protect bloggers

Free Mojtaba Saminejad and Arash Sigarchi


  No More Roadtrips In The Red Shark

Hunter Thompson Dead at 67

"The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others --- the living --- are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.

But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. The association of motorcyles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions." --- HST '65
Link

  Maybe He's A Nihilist
albino bowler action figure
Albino Bowler Action Figure

  Bizarro
Why I love the Interweb: Ask_Metafilter considers the question "What if the world were a cube?"
Quick summary: Not as fun as it sounds

  Cheap Thrills
A personal web-site is like a garden or a hot-rod; there's no end to the tinkering you can do. There's always cool scripts you can add or layout changes to try.
&nbsp Recently I tried out Sitemeter to track hits and referrals but I've changed to the more informative and much better looking Hit-O-Meter.
&nbsp I've also made the big step of adding a comments system, thanks to the good people at Nukekiller who produced Pollxn. All it took was a couple of hours of fiddling around to get it working and looking right and now the 20 or so lost souls who visit me every day from their strange Google searches can leave a note.

  They Live
"Feed The Rich

The other day I was walkin down the street an I saw another one. He was practically freezin in the bitter cold; all he had was a tin cup, a three-piece suit, and a limousine with no minibar. He had a sign that said WILL CHEAT EMPLOYEES OUT OF RETIREMENT PLANS FOR FOOD. It was another homeless CEO.

"Any tax cuts, man?" he says to me. "I just need a little to catch a private plane to the Bahamas... it's so cold, man..."

"Oh well I'm sorry I don't have any tax cuts on me right now" I says real quick while I'm walkin away. Course it was all lies. I had cuts to the capital gains tax, the estate tax an income tax right there in my wallet but I was just too greedy to give em to him. I just walked right by like he didn't exist.

"Oh Fafnir he just woulda spent it all on yachts," says you. Maybe but who are we to judge? Rich people are trapped in a world with too many options and too many choices. Every day they wake to traumatic decisions. Do they eat the caviar, or frolic in the giant pile of gold? It's too much! Panic sets in. If only they had more money to help them sort things out.

That's why stuff like the president's budget is so important right now. The president's workin on reducing the deficit by cutting funding for police and firefighters, veterans' benefits, child care, Medicaid, and food stamps while making his tax cuts permanent. This should finally take money back from the poor, who have so little money they don't know what to do with it, and give it to the rich, who have so much money and need so much more.

But the government can't do everything itself. We have to personally give of ourselves to help those more fortunate than us. Now it's alright to give through your local church or charity but here at Fafblog we've set up somethin special. It's called Adopt-a-Baron, and it lets you pick one of the wealthiest two percent of Americans to help them out yourself. This is Little Davey. For just twenty dollars a day - the price of a table wine - you can buy Little Davey part of a new boat. Won't you help Little Davey and others like him?

Somewhere out there is an old Time-Warner executive with only three houses. Make your commitment today"
Lifted wholesale from Fafblog, because it's just too good not to.

  Mr. Fixit
When I started this blog I wasn't too smart about my naming scheme for posts. I started out with "blog???.txt" and then changed to the 'MMDDYYx.txt'-both of which are just plain wrong. I finally settled on YYMMDDx.txt, but I was left with hundreds of posts with bad filenames. And since Blosxom looks at the modify-date to determine the date of the post I couldn't just batch rename posts without them all being considered as today's posts-that's how I ended up with 55 posts on Sept 8th, 2002.

To fix the problem I wrote a Bash script to change filenames into the form 'YYMMDD.###.txt' based on their modification date while preserving their original date. The script can be found here.

  Shrek Has Risen
shrek has risen
Jolly Green Messiah
Via The Adventures of Accordian Guy...

  Neal Stephenson In Reason Magazine
"Speaking as an observer who has many friends with libertarian instincts, I would point out that terrorism is a much more formidable opponent of political liberty than government. Government acts almost as a recruiting station for libertarians. Anyone who pays taxes or has to fill out government paperwork develops libertarian impulses almost as a knee-jerk reaction. But terrorism acts as a recruiting station for statists. So it looks to me as though we are headed for a triangular system in which libertarians and statists and terrorists interact with each other in a way that I?m afraid might turn out to be quite stable.
...
It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn?t care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don?t belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.

Since our prosperity and our military security for the last three or four generations have been rooted in science and technology, it would therefore seem that we?re coming to the end of one era and about to move into another. Whether it?s going to be better or worse is difficult for me to say. The obvious guess would be ?worse.? If I really wanted to turn this into a jeremiad, I could hold forth on that for a while. But as mentioned before, this country has always found a new way to move forward and be prosperous. So maybe we?ll get lucky again. In the meantime, efforts to predict the future by extrapolating trends in the world of science and technology are apt to feel a lot less compelling than they might have in 1955."
Link
Via Boing Boing

  Fun With Referral Logs
Things I've learned from my new sitemeter logs:
People from Poland have visited
Only about a dozen people a day visit. So much for world domination.
Most of the people come by way of Google Image Search

They have 3 favorite pictures:

coleman for governor

gary Coleman & Mary Carey

Gary Coleman is my main draw. The world is a very strange place.

gert jonnys
The Gert Jonnys come in a distant third, poor buggers

  Unwanted Success
Utility Fog is now #6 out of 94,191,330 in a MSN search for you-know-what (see last post). This is getting scary.