Campaign Finance Bribery Over FISA?

I’ll let you be the judge of this.  According to this article, which cites campaign finance information collected by Maplight.org, 88% of the 94 Democrats who helped pass the new FISA bill last week (after previously opposing it) received an average of $8,359 in campaign funds from the telecommunication companies over the last three years.

I don’t know if it’s that simple.  All I know is that people need to call their state representatives before this bill makes it through the Senate.  If you’re a democrat, you need to make sure that your representatives know that you won’t tolerate them rolling over for the Republicans.  Let them know that you want change!  We don’t want politicians to keep wiping their asses with the constitution!

Second Life Is Stupid

OK, so I know this isn’t very new, but I had to post it up here. I feel like everything I could say about Second Life is pretty well encapsulated in this video. What I still don’t understand, though, is why so many academics get so excited about it, when it’s pretty much just them and various types of lonely sexual deviants on there. It’s like they’re trying to turn this thing that has just about been proven to not be culturally viable (the average user only ever logged in for 12 minutes and never logged back in) into something to study when there are plenty of other useful things to study. And now the government is involved, so it’s just going to become an even bigger clusterfuck.

from secondlife.reuters.c posted with vodpod

A Small Victory in the Fight Against Illegal Surveillance

The EFF secured a minor victory last week in Congress with the passing of a new surveillance bill that does not grant retroactive immunity to telecoms who participated in the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping.  Of course, the bill still needs to go through the Senate, and veto-happy Bush has sworn that any bill that doesn’t grant immunity will not cross his desk.  Read the rest of the article here.