AdamSmith

http://m.guardiannews.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/12/snowden-surveillance-subverting-constitution

A true American -- Sheriff Andy teaches Opie about the Fourth Amendment and due process of law after Opie eavesdrops on a private conversation.

Somehow I don't think he should see these.

Edward Snowden not safe in Hong Kong, warns human rights chiefHong Kong authorities have co-operated with the CIA in the past to remove enemies of US, says Human Rights Watch director Paul Owen guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 11 June 2013 08.41 EDT A ferry sails across Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong, from where Edward Snowden revealed his identity as the source of the NSA spying stories. Photograph: Kin Cheung/AP The US whistleblower Edward Snowden should not consider himself safe in Hong Kong, which has co-operated with the CIA before to remove America's enemies, the emergencies director of Human Rights Watch has warned. "There's little doubt [reason] to believe that the Hong Kong authorities would not co-operate with the CIA in this case," said Peter Bouckaert, who after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi found faxes in Tripoli indicating that the Hong Kong authorities had co-operated with the CIA in rendering an anti-Gaddafi Islamist to Libya. Snowden said he had chosen Hong Kong as the place from which to reveal his identity as the source of the Guardian's series of stories about US surveillance because "they have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent", and because he believed that it was one of the few places in the world that could and would resist the dictates of the US government. Bouckaert, however, said Snowden was mistaken on both points. "The rendition of [sami al-]Saadi took place nine years ago in 2004, but I certainly would not consider Hong Kong a safe place for him [snowden] at the moment," he told the Guardian. "Certainly the reputation of Hong Kong as a place where free speech is defended has decreased in recent years, [and] there is no reason to believe that the very close relationship which is visible from these faxes between the intelligence agency in Hong Kong and the CIA has changed in a significant way … and that Snowden would not be at risk from extradition from Hong Kong." He added: "It's very clear from the faxes that the Hong Kong authorities at the time co-operated very closely with both the CIA and MI6 in bringing Saadi back to Libya, where he was later tortured and sentenced to death." In the event he was not executed. Snowden is currently in Hong Kong, but he moved to a new hotel in an unknown location on Monday. A landmark legal ruling in Hong Kong could buy him time if he decides to apply for asylum there. Meanwhile activists in Iceland are making preparations should the whistleblower try to head there, as he has indicated he might. "My predisposition is to seek asylum in a country with shared values. The nation that most encompasses this is Iceland. They stood up for people over internet freedom," he told the Guardian. On Tuesday, a spokesman for Vladimir Putin said that if Snowden applied for asylum in Russia, the request would be considered. "If such an appeal is given, it will be considered. We'll act according to facts," said Dmitry Peskov. The move seems to have more to do with Russia's support for anti-western dissidents than any commitment to freedom of speech of whistleblowing. At the end of last year British ministers agreed to pay more than £2m to the family of Saadi by way of compensation and without admitting any liability in the case. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/11/edward-snowden-not-safe-hong-kong

An eminently politic pronouncement. (Not "political." )

Quite agree, in all respects. Quail is one of the things I snap up whenever I see it on a restaurant menu. Soft-shell crab, foie gras (hot), and sweetbreads are some others.

fec·u·lent (fky-lnt) adj.Full of foul or impure matter; fecal. [Middle English, from Latin faeculentus, heavy with sediment, from faex, faec-, dregs.] fecu·lence n. I.e., full of shit! ...Others?

How Edward Snowden weakened the case for his defenceThe language of the 1917 Espionage Act may be old-fashioned, but it offers little protection for the whistleblower's modern 'crime' Julian Borger, diplomatic editor guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 11 June 2013 15.42 EDT Edward Snowden: the Espionage Act says nothing about exemptions for leaks claiming to be in the public interest. Photograph: Reuters If Edward Snowden is ever brought back for trial in the US, he would almost certainly be prosecuted under a law dating back to the first world war and which lawyers say is so broadly worded it would leave the National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower with little room for a defence. The 1917 Espionage Act has gone through some amendments over the years but its language still reflects the security concerns of a century ago, with references to railroads, forts and telegraphs. But its all-encompassing character has stood the test of time. Section 793 of the law makes it an offence to take, retain or transfer knowledge "with intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation". The law does not stipulate whether the information involved would have to be classified, as that word was not in usage at the time the act was passed. More importantly from Snowden's point of view, it says nothing about exemptions for leaks claiming to be in the public interest. "As much as some may want Snowden to be applauded for his actions, as a legal matter his self-stated laudable intentions are irrelevant to his criminal liability. He can only hope that it will play a role in his sentencing," argued Mark Zaid, a Washington attorney who regularly represents national security whistleblowers. "Having publicly self-admitted his guilt for having illegally leaked classified information, he has eliminated any likely meaningful legal defence. Snowden unfortunately went about his efforts all wrong and missed available opportunities to generate public debate of the NSA programs but still avoid criminal culpability." Jesselyn Radack, a former justice department whistleblower who is now national security and human rights director at the Government Accountability Project, pointed out that Snowden would also get no benefit from the 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act, as it excludes those working for the armed services or intelligence community. However, Radack said that the legal and constitutional implications of the Espionage Act had not been properly tested in its application to whistleblowers. "Snowden could challenge whether the material involved was properly classified, arguing that the Espionage Act is not supposed to be a cover for illegal conduct," she said. In the most famous attempt to use the act to prosecute a whistleblower, against Daniel Ellsberg, military analyst at the Rand Corporation who leaked documents on the conduct of the Vietnam war, the case was thrown out in 1973 after it emerged that Ellsberg had been illegally wiretapped. Shamai Leibowitz, a FBI linguist who pleaded guilty to leaking details of wiretaps of the Israeli embassy in Washington to a blogger, was sentenced in May 2010 to 20 months in prison. In the most similar case to Snowden's, a NSA employee called Thomas Drake was charged in 2010 with 'mishandling documents' for disclosing details of the agency's Trailblazer program – a means of mass collection of data, like the Prism program leaked by Snowden. However, he was able to demonstrate he had not given away classified material, and all ten charges against him were dropped. Some Espionage Act prosecutions from press leaks are still under way. Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA employee, is being tried for passing to the New York Times details of a plan to pass flawed nuclear weapon blueprints to the Iranians. He has pleaded not guilty. Meanwhile, the court martial of Bradley Manning, the army private charged with the mass release of defence and state department cables to Wikileaks, is under way in Fort Meade, outside Washington. Manning's treatment while in solitary confinement, which was described by the UN special rapporteur on torture as "cruel, inhuman and degrading", may now bolster Snowden's precarious chances of avoiding a US trial altogether by fighting extradition. "In terms of seeking asylum, Snowden would definitely qualify in terms of fear of persecution," Radack said. "Bradley Manning would be exhibit A in that argument." http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/11/edward-snowden-defence?guni=Network%20front:network-front%20aux-1%20mini-bento:Bento%20box%208%20col:Position2

Mmmm... But you make me realize she never mentioned them hunting birds. Although maybe they did; they could have, as everyone had a shotgun. Around these parts I see doves from time to time but not quail that I can recall. Our most common birds, other than robins, seem in fact to be crows and buzzards. Not your more edible avians by any stretch.

Cow methane! In 'Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome' the source was pigs, I recall. I've read of some farmers actually doing this. See also http://www.fwthinking.com/blog/fuel-future-pig-poop/

Its only drawback is that it includes his mouth.

And remember just recently... Madonna sued for millions by Russians offended by her support for gay rights at concert

All perfect!

OK, enough about the NSA for a few minutes anyway. Stuff What Makes a Fart? By Jonathan Smith Did you know that no two farts are exactly alike? It’s true. Farts are sort of like snowflakes in that regard. Little, invisible, smelly, snowflakes. While everybody past the age of 10 is well-versed in the manifold variety of farts and their associated sounds and smells and sensations and sobriquets, precious few of us know anything at all about the sources of their great diversity. Can you, for instance, explain the lingering piquancy of the "hot fart" in any greater scientific detail than "that one was spicy"? I can't. And that's sad. In order to rectify this egregious oversight by the American public school system and get the straight poop on the basics of butt-gas, I had a little sit down with Dr. Lester Gottesman, a proctologist from St. Luke's Roosevelt who bears an uncanny resemblance to Jerry Springer. Vice: Hi, Dr. Gottesman. So we’re here today to talk about farts. Dr. Gottesman: Yes, I suppose we are. What’s up with the wide variety of noises farts make? Why do some come out as squeakers and others like a diesel truck going up a mountain? The kinds of flatulence are directly related to the amount of swallowed air and the ability of the intestine to degrade food stuff to gas. It also has to do with the shape of the sphincter when the gas is released. If the sphincter is tight, it will make a different noise than if it’s more relaxed. Often times my farts feel physically hot. What causes that sensation? The sensation of heat is when the internal sphincter opens a little to sample what’s in the rectum. That is a normal response. If there isn’t a great deal of gas, the body will expel it slower, allowing you to feel the fart’s heat. If there is a lot of gas, the gas comes out too quickly for the body to feel the heat. Is the temperature of the slow, hot farts actually higher than the quick, cool ones? The temperature should be the same. Again, it is a product of the amount and speed in which one expels gas. What’s the reason behind the smell? The smell has to do with the amount of absorbed products like methane, which is made by fermentation of what we eat, and that’s what causes the bad smell, basically. As a baby, when you’re born, passing through the vagina, you’re infected by the bacteria in your mother’s colon, and that’s the bacteria you’re dealt for your lifetime. Also, everybody is different in how they’ll digest wheat products, milk products, whatever. And if they are not digested properly there will be a lot of methane produced and a lot of acid, and that would tend to cause a stinkier bowl movement. Wait, go back to that thing about the vagina. A baby is born with a sterile intestinal track. During the delivery, there’s lots of fluid and stool and whatever, and it’s thought that at that exposure the baby’s colon is populated by the mother’s colon bacteria, thereby affecting the smell of the individual's farts for the rest of their lifetime. There’s also other theories claiming the colon is populated during the first few months of exposure to fecal material, but that probably doesn’t affect the smell as much as the initial intake of feces by the baby during delivery. Wow. It's like original shit sin. Does what your mother ate prior to delivery effect the bacteria you get? Yes. In fact, they now also think that the appendix keeps an arsenal of bacteria so that if, for whatever reason, the bacteria in your colon gets killed by antibiotics the appendix can repopulate your colon with the bacteria that you’ve had since birth. That’s the new thought as to why the appendix is around. So the signature smell of your farts wholly depends on how much poop your mom had at the time… It’s not the amount, just the type of bacteria. OK, but that's really what determines your fart smell forever? Well, there are also other components. Farts are made by two things. They are made by one, the amount of air you swallow--so people who drink a lot of soda, chew a lot of gum, suck on candies, they get a lot of air into their colon, and that air comes out in farts. The second component is gas production by the colon. The colon’s job is to break down the nutrients in food products, like proteins and fats and sugars, and in the process of breaking them down they produce either sulfur or methane, neither of which smell great. If, let’s say, the colon has stuff in it like grapes and beans, and if it’s just sitting there for a few days it’s just going to ferment more and more until it becomes very smelly, versus if what you eat goes through quickly--like if you had the same beans, but it came out eight hours later, you’ll tend not to have as much gas from those beans. So it has to do with what your intestinal transit is. For most people, it takes 32 hours from the time they eat something to the time they shit something. That’s the average, so that means there are people who move their bowels every three or four days, and they have more time for the beans to ferment in the colon, thereby producing larger amounts of gas and more frequent, smellier spasms of gas. What’s the correlation between the increased level of farts and drinking beer or coffee? Well, beer is carbonated, so that’s why it makes you fart. Coffee causes the sphincter muscles to relax just a little bit, so you tend to have more farts by accident if you’re drinking something with caffeine than if you aren't. A lot of times when I wake up really early I have worse gas than when I wake up later in the day. Does that happen to a lot of people or just me? You have worse gas early in the morning? Yeah, like, if I wake up at six for whatever reason, I’ll be a lot gassier for the first couple of hours I’m awake than if I wake up at nine or so. When do you move your bowels? First thing in the morning. Do you have a lot of gas with the bowel movement? I do, but what I'm trying to explain is if I wake up at my normal time I don’t have that much gas, but if I wake up really early, whether or not I take a crap, I’ll still have a ton of gas that goes along with it. Well, it's possible the gas is being metabolized more by your the later you sleep. If you get up at six and take a dump at that time, the colon hasn’t had as much time to metabolize, so what’s coming out is incomplete, metabolized gas. That may be your answer, but honestly I've never heard of this before. Well, that's disconcerting. Now, I imagine that you’re familiar with “oops poops.” No, what’s that? It’s when you think you’re going to fart, but then a little bit of poop comes out. Oh, OK, sure. What I've noticed is, often when it happens it's not preceded by the urge to shit--it just feels like it's going to be a regular fart. Does that have anything to do with poop speed or it's position in the intestines or anything? No, it has to do with the muscles of the anus. There are two muscles of control. One muscle, the internal muscle which is active all the time, it’s the one that allows you to sit on that chair without shitting on the chair, then you also have the external muscle which is a voluntary muscle like your biceps. And when you need to hold stool in it will contract, and keep the stool on the inside. The passage that you are describing happens for one of several reasons. One is that the internal muscle has become very labile, meaning any little input inside the anus causes it to relax. Sometimes it relaxes too much, and that can cause stool to slip out. The other reason is you could have hemorrhoids--everybody has hemorrhoids, but people with bigger hemorrhoids sometimes experience gas slipping out between the hemorrhoids and taking with it mucus material produced by the hemorrhoids, which can cause staining of your underwear. That is shockingly gross. How long is gas in our body before it comes out? About 30 hours. It has to go through five feet of large intestine, and 25 feet of small intestine. This is an anal probe. The whole black part of the rod goes in. Where does the differentiation between burps and farts occur? Why does some gas come out of your mouth vs. your ass? It has to do with the configuration and the tone of muscles in your stomach. If you drink a whole lot of liquid with bubbles quickly, if you take one of these [picks up a can of diet Pepsi] and down it quickly there will be so much gas produced that the gas will need to go someplace, and the best place to go is to come back up. If you’re drinking a small amount, then it has time to work its way through the small intestine and get to the large intestine, at which point the body starts fermenting it. OK, while I've got you here, what’s the strangest thing that you’ve seen up a butt? Oh, a little of everything--beer bottles, milk bottles, every can of vegetable known to man. Have you ever seen a beer bottle that broke up there? No, they tend to stay together, beer bottles are fairly strong. I’ve also seen balloons, condoms, toys with the batteries still working. Do those people waddle in? Well, they usually wait until the middle of the night because they don’t want to be seen, and occasionally we have to operate on them. Do you see more girls or guys with stuff stuck up there? More girls than I would have imagined, but mostly guys--mostly gay guys. I’ve also had people who want me to operate on their anuses to make their fart sounds a little more appealing. Get the fuck out of here, what kind of a fart sound are they going for? Generally they have a higher pitched sound, and they want something with a lower pitch. Like a baritone versus a squeaker? Basically. So I had to configure their anus skin so their fart sound would be more to their pleasing. Oh shit, you actually did it? Someone paid you to make their farts sound better. Well they tried to put it through with their insurance. Which insurance company is willing to pay for that? None, so far all the companies have denied it. But the people try and then they end up having to pay for it. Any other weird stuff going on? A lot of the gay guys I see do things like fisting and double fisting--you name it they do it. So you always have to be on your toes as to what they’ve potentially done to end up in the situation they’re in. I’ve had a patient, he was on crack, of course, but he put a pogo stick on the steps, and he shot it straight up his ass and messed up his colon and prostate. Oh dear god please tell me you're joking. Nope. Another case that comes to mind is a woman who took an egg whisk and put it up her husband’s butt, and that made a bad mess. Usually, for the majority of these accidents, people are on crack or coke. Did you enjoy this article? Sure you did. Want to read more about farts and shit? Yeah you do. The VICE Guide to Shit Whose Farts Smell Worse: Carnivores or Herbivores? I'm Empty Inside @Jonathan_Smth http://www.vice.com/read/what-makes-a-fart

Anal probing by aliens is a joke commonly made regarding popular culture that originates[citation needed] with the work of narrative story Communion: A True Story (1987) by Whitley Strieber: There were clothes strewn apart, and two of the stocky ones drew my legs apart. The next thing I knew I was being shown an enormous and extremely ugly object, grey and scaly, with a sort of network of wires on the end. It was at least a foot long, narrow, and triangular in structure. They inserted the thing into my rectum. It seemed to swarm into me as if it had a life of its own. Apparently, its purpose was to take samples, possibly of fecal matter, but at the same time I had the impression I was being raped and for the first time I felt anger. [ 1 ] Communion was adapted into a 1989 film starring Christopher Walken. Alien anal probing has been a comedy staple since 1995, when Saturday Night Live did a segment about it.[2] Examples include: In the "Citizen Kang" segment of the Simpsons episode Treehouse of Horror VII (1996), the character Homer Simpson gets abducted by aliens and reacts by saying "I suppose you want to probe me. Well, you might as well get it over with" and starts mooning the aliens. The obviously disgusted aliens however react by saying "Stop! We have reached the limits of what rectal probing can teach us!". The South Park pilot episode, "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" (1997), in which Cartman gets an anal probe by aliens. Also, in the episode "The Death of Eric Cartman", Butters is "examined" by a doctor through use of a giant, red, vibrating anal probe. A memorable sketch, "Career Crisis", from the TV program The Kids in the Hall S04E11, features two aliens discussing the purpose and motivation for anally probing Earthlings, and that all they have learned is that "one in ten likes it." Gaia Online, an anime-based role-playing game website, held a 2006 Halloween event featuring trading of alien, human, and bovine anal probes. In the cartoon series Futurama, the character Philip J. Fry is abducted by a flying saucer whose vanity plate reads "PROBE #1." In the Destroy All Humans! video game series, there is a weapon called the anal probe, which is shot at people for brain stems. In the movie Men in Black II, the character Newton (played by David Cross) raises the question, "What's up with anal probing?" In the movie Planet 51, two aliens have a conversation about probing and using corks to prevent it. In the "Glee" episode "Britney/Brittany" Brittany says "this reminds me of the spaceship where I was probed" In the movie Paul, the character Graeme asks Paul the alien when he first meets him "Are you gonna probe us ?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anal_probing

Yes! Fess Parker, at any rate. And It was "D. Boon Cilled a Bar (on) this Tree in The Year 1760." Similar principle?

I did not know that! It was, by reports, a bird that he experimented with freezing. So by extension let us suffer no mention here of turkey bacon nor other properly porcine foodstuffs lately 'improved' through substitution of fowl.

Someone just tweeted: Last week: NSA has access to Apple's cloud; This week: New OS X will store your passwords in Apple's cloud #WWDC #PRISM

Bit of a hack-work piece, but indicative of much more doubtless to come along these lines: Why PRISM kills the cloud

So it will work when shipped?