Earth’s Hum Sounds More Mysterious Than Ever

Earth gives off a relentless hum of countless notes completely imperceptible to the human ear, like a giant, exceptionally quiet symphony, but the origin of this sound remains a mystery.

Future investigations of this part of the hum will prove challenging, as “this is a very small signal that is hard to measure, and the excitation is probably due to multiple interactions in a complex system,” said researcher Rudolf Widmer-Schnidrig, a geoscientist at the University of Stuttgart, Germany.

What could it be? I like Mark Morford’s take on it:

Me, I like to think of the Earth as essentially a giant Tibetan singing bowl, flicked by the middle finger of God and set to a mesmerizing, low ring for about 10 billion years until the tone begins to fade and the vibration slows and eventually the sound completely disappears into nothingness and the birds are all, hey what the hell happened to the music? And God just shrugs and goes, well that was interesting.

Heh.

Chertoff Says Fingerprints Aren’t ‘Personal Data’

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has badly stumbled in discussing the Bush administration’s push to create stricter identity systems. Chertoff was recently in Canada discussing, among other topics, the so-called “Server in the Sky” program to share fingerprint databases among the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia.

Many of us should rightfully be surprised that our fingerprints aren’t considered “personal data” by the head of DHS. Even more importantly, DHS itself disagrees. In its definition of “personally identifiable information” — the information that triggers a Privacy Impact Assessment when used by government — the Department specifically lists: “biometric identifiers (e.g., fingerprints).”

Thankfully, when Bush leaves, his cast of clueless liberty grabbers will as well. This guy, well, I see a future as a Wal-Mart greeter.

That is all.

I guess having the most profitable industries in the history of the world just ain’t good enough for some folks:

Libya Seeks Exemption for Its Debt to Victims

WASHINGTON — One by one, top executives of American oil companies met privately over the last year with Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, often in his signature Bedouin tent, as they lined up contracts allowing them to tap into the country’s oil reserves.

The law allows victims of state-sponsored terrorism to collect court judgments by seizing foreign assets in the United States or money from those governments held by American companies doing business with them. If Libya loses a half-dozen court cases still pending, $3 billion to $6 billion could be at stake, according to lawyers’ estimates.

Contemptible. But wait! Of course, oil companies can only do so much damage on their own. For people really, really adept at making bad things worse, and screwing victims, you need high level government officials:

The lobbying effort has already produced one important result: four Bush administration cabinet members wrote Congress last month urging lawmakers to agree to the waiver. Likening the asset-seizure provision to “a new form of economic sanctions,” the letter said it would have “a chilling effect on potentially billions of dollars in investments by U.S. companies in Libya’s oil sector.”

The law also puts the American oil companies at a disadvantage in competing for access to Libya’s 40 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, said the letter, which was signed by Robert M. Gates, the defense secretary; Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state; Samuel W. Bodman, the energy secretary; and Carlos M. Gutierrez, the commerce secretary.

Words fail. What utterly unredeemable jackals.

Tent city highlights US homes crisis

Forty miles east of Los Angeles, on a patch of waste ground, is the place they call Tent City.

But word spread and now some 300 people live here. It has an air of scruffy permanence, and indeed, city officials say there are no current plans to close it down.

I imagine not, since the housing situation isn’t getting any better in the foreseeable future.

But ya know, the last time we let a feckless president run our economy into the ground, the poor built shacks:

So now we got tents? Tents? Come on people, I mean, I know you bought ‘em at REI and all, but geez, have some standards!

Supreme Court says police may search even if arrest invalid

The Supreme Court affirmed Wednesday that police have the power to conduct searches and seize evidence, even when done during an arrest that turns out to have violated state law.

Instead, city detectives arrested Moore and prosecutors say that drugs taken from him in a subsequent search can be used against him as evidence.

Why not just stop people at random, strip ‘em, and go from there? Why bother with this petty middle step of arresting them? I mean, when I think suspended license, my next thought is always crackhead. Evidently the state is infallible, so I’ll just hush.

VA confirms 18 vets commit suicide every day

In a stunning admission, top officials at the Veterans Health Administration confirmed that the agency’s own statistics show that an average of 126 veterans per week — 6,552 veterans per year — commit suicide, according to an internal email distributed to several VA officials.

But, then, some of us are pretty dopey. In the Common Core survey, nearly 20 percent of respondents did not know who the U.S. fought in World War II. Eleven percent thought that Dwight Eisenhower was the president forced from office by the Watergate scandal. Another 11 percent thought it was Harry Truman.

We’ve got work to do.

Continue with Clueless in America

Christie Todd Whitman Not Liable For Telling Residents That World Trade Center Air Was Safe To Breathe, Judge Rules

NEW YORK — Former EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman cannot be held liable for telling residents near the World Trade Center site that the air was safe to breathe after the 2001 terrorist attacks, a federal appeals court said Tuesday.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Whitman’s comments reassuring people about the safety around the site apparently were based on conflicting information and reassurances by the White House.

Nobody accountable for anything.

Don’t get to say that often, but…

Supreme Court rules Internet user has right to privacy

The state Supreme Court ruled today that under the New Jersey Constitution an Internet user has the right to privacy in the subscriber information maintained by the individual’s Internet service provider.

The court upheld a state appeals court ruling that overturned the conviction for second-degree computer theft.