Psychopolitik 2.0

Found an amusing bit of info on a board I check out occasionally.  If you have Windows XP Pro, do this sometime:

1. Open Notepad
2. Go to the menu bar in Notepad & pick “File > Open”
3. In the file type dropdown box, change “txt” to “all files”
4. Go to the following folder from the open box: “C:\Windows\help\tours\windowsmediaplayer\audio\wav”
5. Pick one of the wav files & open it.  Wait a moment, it’ll work, trust me.
6. In the resulting Notepad window you’ll see a bunch of gibberish.  Scroll to the bottom of it.

If you did this right, you should see the following line: “INFOICRD   2000-04-06  IENG       Deepz0ne  ISFT   Sound Forge 4.5″

That’s an embedded info tag that shows what program the file was created in.  “Deepz0ne” is a software cracker, known for having cracked Sound Forge years back.  That this tag shows up here can mean only one thing: Microsoft used the hacked copy.
Keep that in mind next time you go to install an update & Windows gives you that warning about wanting to check if your OS is “genuine”.

Excuse me while I throw up:

Drink beer, eat candy, buy a car. Now add a new pitch to next year’s lineup of Super Bowl television ads: Vote for me. Politics? On Super Bowl Sunday?

As states line up to hold presidential primaries on the first Tuesday in February, the Feb. 3 Super Bowl could look super inviting and super expensive to presidential campaigns eager to deliver a knockout punch.

“That is a very ripe and timely target,” said Mark McKinnon, chief media strategist for President Bush in 2000 and 2004 and now an adviser to Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record)’s presidential campaign. “It would reach a huge audience at a very critical time. I think campaigns will look very closely at that.”

That campaigns would give serious thought to advertising on Super Bowl Sunday illustrates how a packed primary schedule in early February could upend the traditional pace and the time-tested strategies of presidential elections.

No.  If you’re arrogant enough to put a campaign ad on Superbowl Sunday, then chances are you have no concept of shame.  Consider yourself disqualified.

Many elements among the insurgency in Iraq think women are 2nd class citizens.  But when something needs to be blown up look what they do…

Most often, the images of Iraqi insurgents are of men firing mortars or destroying humvees. But there’s another face — of female insurgents.

Of the hundreds of suicide bombings in Iraq, at least seven have been carried out by women — like the one at a Baghdad university in February. Some 40 people were killed.

And insurgents are using more women.

“Women are not only more difficult to stop, but they also tend to be much more successful,” says Mia Bloom, a counterterrorism expert at the University of Georgia. They are less likely to be stopped at the entrance to a restaurant, a club or a bus. And they can get in more deeply and cause more damage.

In Iraqi culture, men almost never pat down women. Insurgent leaders know women will pass right through checkpoints.

Says a lot, doesn’t it?

Glenn Greenwald: ain’t shit changed but the address.

Here he points out how easily sideways arguments for genocide slide from the lips of the Endless War Caucus, despite their claims that thinking the world isn’t meant to be reshaped by force is a sign of elitism.

A recent publicity stunt involving a hydrogen-electric car, if not for the reaction time of Alan Mulally (the worthless CEO of Ford I mentioned recently), would’ve resulted in the words “President Dick Cheney” making sense.

This fool has control of nuclear weapons…*sigh*

Maybe this is why the wingers are swearing up and down Iran wants to attack us:

A Pakistani tribal militant group responsible for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran has been secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence sources tell ABC News.

The group, called Jundullah, is made up of members of the Baluchi tribe and operates out of the Baluchistan province in Pakistan, just across the border from Iran.

It has taken responsibility for the deaths and kidnappings of more than a dozen Iranian soldiers and officials.

They weasel-word the rest, saying “well we don’t give them funding!”.  Bullshit, support is support.

Props.

“What?  Employee-owned business actually works better than a top-down command structure?  Wow!  Whodathunkit?”

Props.

Did somebody say “diplomacy“?:

President Bashar al-Assad met a Republican member of the U.S. Congress on Thursday, a day after Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ended a visit to Syria that was criticized by the White House.

The official news agency said the meeting between Assad and Darrell Issa, a member of the House Committee on Intelligence, discussed ways to improve relations between Washington and Damascus.

Go ahead, Dubya: call him a sellout.  Try it, you know you want to.  It’s rattling around in your skull that any communication not involving bombs is hippie crap, we can see it on your face, go right ahead and let it out.

Yet more proof that in CEO-land, market logic does not apply.  All emphasis mine:

Ford Motor Co., which posted a loss of $12.7 billion last year, said on Thursday that Chief Executive Alan Mulally received $28.18 million in compensation in 2006, including an $18.5 million bonus.

Mulally, a former Boeing Co. executive, replaced Ford family scion Bill Ford Jr. as chief executive last September.

Try having that kind of performance at your job and see if you get a bonus…

While my state is so clenched that merely allowing a vote on Sunday liquor sales is seen as some type of affront to human decency, Florida is joining the 21st Century on a rather serious issue:

In a change billed by some as historic but others as incremental, Gov. Charlie Crist and the Florida Cabinet this morning approved a plan to give back the civil rights of tens, and possibly hundreds, of thousands of convicted felons.

Crist and Cabinet members voted 3-1 to overhaul the state’s Jim Crow-era system forcing most convicted felons who fulfilled their sentences to complete a cumbersome — sometimes impossible — application process before their civil rights are restored, including the rights to vote, hold elected office and serve on a jury.

Under the new process, most convicted felons — as many as eight in 10, according to Crist’s office — will no longer have to wait for a hearing before their rights are restored. People convicted of more violent crimes, such as car-jacking, kidnapping and assault, will still have to go through a hearing, but they will no longer have to wait five years first. Only people convicted of the most heinous crimes — murder and sex crimes — will have to go through the full application process.

It only makes sense.  If these people have done their time and have reintegrated themselves back into society, there is no reason whatsoever for them to remain second-class citizens.  Ex-cons have been punished for their entire lives, all because of outdated rules that were designed more for racist purposes than for anything having to do with the system as a whole.  Surprisingly astute on Charlie’s part to realize the wrong in this, good one…