meehawl

The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country … Internal government records show that most sedated deportees, such as Ade, received a cocktail of three drugs that included Haldol, also known as haloperidol, a medication normally used to treat schizophrenia and other acute psychotic states … They were also given Ativan, used to control anxiety, and … Cogentin, a medication that is supposed to lessen Haldol’s side effects of muscle spasms and rigidity … Haldol gained notoriety in the Soviet Union, where it was often given to political dissidents imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals.

Tags: Ativan, Cogentin, Haldol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, immigration, psychotropics, torture by mike
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From day one of the public hearings held in Derry’s ornate Victorian Guildhall, the Bloody Sunday inquiry has served as a cash cow for the army of solicitors and barristers involved. Official figures show that legal costs have swallowed more than half of the £181m spent up to the end of last year. The senior QCs alone have pocketed well over £20m, and the gravy train is still rolling. The final bill for Saville’s seemingly interminable investigation – which heard its last witness three years ago but continues to cost around £500,000 per month – seems certain to exceed £250m and could reach £400m

Tags: Bloody Sunday, Derry, Ireland, Londonderry, Northern Ireland, The Troubles, Ulster, lawyers by mike
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The New York Times has an article reviewing a book which basically worries that Silicon Valley “innovation” is hollowing, consisting mainly of me-too companies with low barriers to entry being funded by cautious, herd-chasing VC cash and bought by large technology companies flush with dumb public stock market funds that have lost the ability to generate internal innovation. The first irony is that the book is written by a person who profitted handsomely when her streaming video startup (”funded in 6 minutes“!) was bought by Cisco in the late 1990s using a no-money-down dilutive stock swap at the tail end of the streaming multimedia mini-bubble.

Part of the reason, she said, was that Cisco and other fast-growing big companies started acquiring start-ups with innovative technologies instead of developing new ideas internally.

The second irony? Right under the article, the first entry in the “Related” posts is Cisco Buys E-Mail and Calendaring Start-Up for $215 Million. Yes, in the middle of 2008, Cisco can still piss away $215m buying a three-year-old open-source, Linux-based email/calendar startup. In 2008, email/calendaring must be such a difficult, virtually intractable problem that it requires outside solutions.

Tags: Cisco, PostPath, Silicon Valley, capitalism, innovation, technology by mike
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Here were professionals who deal daily with money, yet know next to nothing about other people’s incomes. When asked to relate themselves to the rest of the population, these high-earners utterly misjudged the magnitude of their privilege. How much, we asked our group, would it take to put someone in the top 10% of earners? They put the figure at £162,000. In fact, in 2007 it was around £39,825, the point at which the top tax band began. Our group found it hard to believe that nine-tenths of the UK’s 32m taxpayers earned less than that. As for the poverty threshold, our lawyers and bankers fixed it at £22,000. But that sum was just under median earnings, which meant they regarded ordinary wages as poverty pay … The worse off give proportionately more of their income. The top fifth of households give less than 1% of their total income, while the poorest 10th give three times as much, or 3% of their income.

Tags: UK, United Kingdom, bankers, charity, class, lawyers, wealth by mike
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Democracy spreads at last to Meehawlistan. Added a voting system to the blog using the WP-PostRatings plugin. Vote early, vote often.

Tags: Wordpress by mike
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Domestic cattle (n = 8,510 in 308 pastures) across the globe, and grazing and resting red and roe deer (n = 2,974 at 241 localities), align their body axes in roughly a north–south direction … magnetic alignment is the most parsimonious explanation. To test the hypothesis that cattle orient their body axes along the field lines of the Earth’s magnetic field, we analyzed the body orientation of cattle from localities with high magnetic declination. Here, magnetic north was a better predictor than geographic north. This study reveals the magnetic alignment in large mammals based on statistically sufficient sample sizes.

Tags: cattle, cows, deer, magnetoreception, magnetosensing, migration, neuroscience, science by mike
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I get credit for a lot of things I didn’t do. I just did a little piece on packet switching and I get blamed for the whole goddamned Internet, you know? Technology reaches a certain ripeness and the pieces are available and the need is there and the economics look good—it’s going to get invented by somebody.