Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: “The next stop along the slippery slope.” One of the first things to strike me when the United States began its terrorism craze was, “great - now that terrorism is double-super-illegal, we need to worry about what actions are defined as terrorism.” Well guess what? Your public servants are being trained to classify peaceful assembly as terrorism.

If I may quote from the amendments to the US Constitution:

“Amendment I. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Regarding that last part - the part about assembly and petition? That’s terrorism. See, the reason you can’t protest anymore is that if you do, you’re an enemy of the state, and you’re not protected by the constitution if you’re not really a citizen. Isn’t that a clever way of getting around the constitution?

What? You have a problem with that? Well you certainly can’t protest about it. You want to disappear to Cuba and get tortured? I didn’t think so, citizen.

RTFA: http://open.salon.com/blog/dennis_loo/2009/06/14/d…

The Department of Defense is training all of its personnel in its current Antiterrorism and Force Protection Annual Refresher Training Course that political protest is “low-level terrorism.”

The Training introduction reads as follows:

“Anti-terrorism (AT) and Force Protection (FP) are two facets of the Department of Defense (DoD) Mission Assurance Program. It is DoD policy, as found in DoDI 2000.16, that the DoD Components and the DoD elements and personnel shall be protected from terrorist acts through a high pirority, comprehensive, AT program. The DoD’s AT program shall be all encompassing using an integrated systems approach.”

The first question of the Terrorism Threat Factors, “Knowledge Check 1″ section reads as follows:

Which of the following is an example of low-level terrorism activity?

Select the correct answer and then click Check Your Answer.

O Attacking the Pentagon

O IEDs

O Hate crimes against racial groups

O Protests

***

The “correct” answer is Protests.

Okay - this is totally hilarious: politician makes dumb remark on twitter, entire country responds (also on twitter).

My contribution: @petehoekstra I got a little sunburned today. Now I know what Chernobyl must have been like.

I think the term for this is “LMAO-schadenfreude.”

RTFA: http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/06/twitter…

Earlier today, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) put up this astonishing post on Twitter, likening the oppression of the Iranian people to the plight of House Republicans:

Iranian twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House.

In the hours since, the Twitter community has responded — with massive heckling. Here’s just a small sample of some of the best ones:

ArjunJaikumar @petehoekstra i spilled some lukewarm coffee on myself just now, which is somewhat analogous to being boiled in oil

chrisbaskind @petehoekstra My neighbor stopped me to talk today. Now I know what it is like to be questioned by the Basij!

UPDATE: what have we here? Oh! Pete Hoekstra is now a meme.

Haha! Jim Henson apparently made proto-muppet commercials for a coffee company, and they are AMAZINGLY violent. A young kermit (Wilkins) keeps threatening or murdering Wontkins, all because Wontkins is unwilling to try this brand of coffee. Yes murder, including gangland-style execution by a disembodied hand, by cannon, by dynamite, and probably a few other ways in this short clip.

How is it, then, that it’s hilarious? I don’t know, but there you have it. Violence can be funny, if Jim Henson is behind it somehow.

RTFA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ky7g1lgTwc&eurl=ht…

From Super Punch:

In 1957, Jim Henson was approached by a Washington, D.C. coffee company to produce ads for Wilkins Coffee. The local stations only had ten seconds for station identification, so the commercials had to be lightning-fast — essentially, eight seconds for the commercial pitch and a two-second shot of the product.

From 1957 to 1961, Henson made 179 commercials for Wilkins Coffee and other Wilkins products, including Community Coffee and Wilkins Tea. The ads were so successful and well-liked that they sparked a series of remakes for companies in other local markets throughout the 1960s.

RTFA: http://www.monsieurcok.com/film_monsieurcok.html

I am amazed by this film; it has it all. The technique is out of this world, the humor is extremely dark, and the story is great. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll watch it at the source. If you are too lazy for your own good, then watch it right here:

Whatever you do, be sure to watch.

This is a fun cat-and-mouse story about the evolution of the Conficker worm, and the people who are trying to understand it. The story ominously concludes that while Conficker hasn’t done much that is publicly visible, there are possibly millions of zombie computers lying in wait.

RTFA: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227121.500…

If every Windows user had downloaded the security patch Microsoft supplied, all would have been well. Not all home users regularly do so, however, and large companies often take weeks to install a patch. That provides windows of opportunity for criminals.

No one knows the identity of Conficker’s “patient zero” computer, or precisely when it was infected. It was probably a machine that the hackers already controlled. Once installed, the software set to work, surreptitiously scanning the internet for other vulnerable machines to send itself to.

The new worm soon ran into a listening device, a “network telescope”, housed by the San Diego Supercomputing Center at the University of California. The telescope is a collection of millions of dummy internet addresses, all of which route to a single computer. It is a useful monitor of the online underground: because there is no reason for legitimate users to reach out to these addresses, mostly only suspicious software is likely to get in touch.

The telescope’s logs show the worm spreading in a flash flood. For most of 20 November, about 3000 infected computers attempted to infiltrate the telescope’s vulnerable ports every hour - only slightly above the background noise generated by older malicious code still at large. At 6 pm, the number began to rise. By 9 am the following day, it was 115,000 an hour. Conficker was already out of control.