Here, this is interesting

This is a good article on smartphone usage and networks in North America vs. everywhere else in the world, posted by mattsnaps over on his Facebook account. I know that I would happily trade half my "minutes" allotment (550, the smallest they offer; I never even approach that number) for twice as many txt messages, and the phone company would make much more money, not less. I want txt; I don't care about yakking so much. It's bad enough that I've been installing IM clients so I can txt IM functionality without paying AT&T's stupidly expensive SMS charges, which are both standard in North America and a complete scam.

Everything the author says about the primitiveness of the US cell network - and the providers who run it - is true, btw. Canada's is even worse. (Rogers, I'm looking in your direction. And glaring. Nastily.) I had a little exposure to non-North American phones in Japan, and I missed my crap leased phone until just the last week or so, when I got spazzkat's old iPhone when he upgraded. That's comparing Japanese junk phones to top of the North American line; the common non-"smart" consumer phone still sucks.

"classic Kremlin bailout technique"

Glenn Greenwald collects a whole series of stories from last fall's massive bank bailout - that I protested on the streets, along with a tiny number of other people - and how it takes us to tomorrow's expected blowout profits by Goldman Sachs in the face of job losses expected to climb through 2010. I've written a few times about regulatory capture in the US government and economy - where those interests or subsets of those interests supposedly being regulated take control over the regulatory bodies and rewrite the regulations for their own benefit - and how the US government is, in fact, in a state of regulatory capture. Mr. Greenwald's series articles and excerpts illustrates this situation pretty clearly. He even links to an article in The Atlantic that I've linked earlier.

Oh, and I might as well include this, since it's the same site; the reports of Eric Holder "leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's brutal interrogation practices" appear to involve another pseudo-investigation of the lower rank and file - another round of scapegoating to protect the policymakers. The effect would be another round of protection and precedent for the fundamental idea that if the Executive branch decides something is legal, it is legal, law and treaty be damned. All you have to do is come up with somebody who will write a legal memo saying any damned thing and you're off to the races. More here, from Sullivan, and here, from John Cole. Cole asks:

Given the inevitability of epic mayhem from the GOP, I fail to see what Holder gains by enacting his probe in the least useful manner imaginable... Hard to believe as it may seem, Holder’s probe will take John Yoo’s work, the famous memos that would make your ass dumber if you wiped with them, and treat them as the settled law of the time. Already clear and public evidence that DOJ lawyers drafted those memos entirely in bad faith, on orders from Bush officials who literally dictated what they wanted the memos to say, will be similarly ignored... To put it bluntly, this strategy is a goddamn disgrace. We called it whitewashing when the Bush administration made a few grunts pay for the orders they followed at Abu Ghraib. We called it a disgrace because that’s what it was. What do you think we should call it now? ...to stop there and call it justice makes me physically ill.

I know the feeling.

Here, please enjoy this

Don't get pissy at the post office - you might spend four years in jail. Like this woman did. Please do enjoy your arbitrary-arrest and indefinite-detention police state. (Found by nihilistic_kid. Opening from the Tuscon Weekly article:

On Oct. 15, 2004, Mary Elizabeth Schipke entered the Oracle post office to buy a 47-cent stamped envelope. When she got frustrated with the clerk behind the counter, she told her: "God, I pray a bomb falls on your stupid, fucking head."

Almost a year later, Schipke was convicted of threatening a federal facility with weapons of mass destruction. Schipke describes what she told the clerk that day as an "imprecatory prayer"—basically, a simple curse—but that defense didn't keep her from serving a four-year prison sentence, with the last two years at Carswell, a women's federal medical prison outside of Fort Worth, Texas, that has been the subject of allegations about the questionable care of prisoners with physical and psychiatric conditions.

Schipke's a nut, but this is bullshit of the first order - and exactly the kind of goddamn bullshit I've been screaming about.