28 Oct 2006
Bush Signs Bill Enabling Martial Law

Holy shit - they've revised the Insurrection Act! This is the de-facto repeal of the Posse Comitatus statue - enacted after the Civil War to insure that troops could not be used domestically except with the consent of Congress. Executive privilege, indeed...

If you ever wondered why the Founding Fathers put in that pesky 2nd Amendment, this should clarify the situation.

An anonymous reader writes to point us to an article on the meaning of a new law that President Bush signed on Oct. 17. It seems to allow the President to impose martial law on any state or territory, using federal troops and/or the state's own, or other states', National Guard troops.

(link) [Slashdot]

20:02 /Politics | 2 comments | permanent link

SPAM Chatter
SPAMEvery once in a while I scan my SPAM traps to make sure that I've not caught a live one, so to speak. I hardly ever find legit emails in there, but every once in a while I run across a piece of junk that's, well, interesting.

This one isn't from Planet Dyslexia, because the grammar, spelling and word order are all correct. It seems to be from the insane asylum but it's a lot more cogent than other such missives, and it included an inline image that was pitching Viagra so it was in fact trying to sell something.

So I'm inventing a new category - Chatter SPAM. It greatly resembles the output of a chatterbot - it can certainly make you look twice, but there's no way this would pass a Turing Test. Here's the bit that piqued my interest:

When a statesmanlike eggplant hibernates, an inferiority complex of a warranty trembles. The hairy crank case dances with an alleged sheriff. Sometimes the nearest anomaly leaves, but an anomaly near the spider always usually caricatures a garbage can! Most people believe that a line dancer seeks a temporal hydrogen atom, but they need to remember how ridiculously a smelly cashier daydreams.

In fact, given the format, I'd wager a guess that this was generated by something akin to Racter, which was an absolutely fascinating bit of code. I worked with one of the authors of Racter in the late 80's, adapting it for use on a bulletin board system as "entertainment", going so far as to pipe it's output into a variation of Eliza, the "AI" program that aped a psychologist. That was interesting - the good doctor crashed and burned in short order!

But of course, all of that was long before the Curse of SPAM swamped the Net - when you could still use Usenet, and new emails were placed directly into your inbox. The good old days, indeed.

11:33 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

Keep Cigarettes Legal

A rational look at the effects of outright prohibition of tobacco ... from a guy who hates cigarettes and is convinced that smoking hastened the death of his father.

Maybe it's time to ask: what if cigarettes became the new Prohibition?

(link) [Ethan Nadelmann]

via Overlawyered

08:24 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link