THIS MODERN WORLD

You dumb shit, he didn’t get access using a fake name, he used his real name. You lefties’ concern for White House security is really touching, but you know what, you stupid asshole, I think the Secret Service has it covered. Go crawl back into your hole, you stupid left-wing shithead. And don’t bother us anymore. You have to have an IQ over 50 to correspond with us. You don’t qualify, you stupid shit.

That’s how the guys who write Time magazine’s “Blog of the Year” respond to some fairly mild criticism from another blogger.

(Via Atrios.)

This sucks:

Hunter S. Thompson, a renegade journalist whose “gonzo” style threw out any pretense at objectivity and established the hard-living writer as a counter-culture icon, fatally shot himself at his Colorado home on Sunday night, police said. He was 67.

Thompson’s son, Juan, released a statement saying he had found his father dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head at the writer’s Owl Creek farm near Aspen.

Story.

When I visited the museum at the former Dachau concentration camp, many years ago, there was an exhibit of photographs intended to viscerally illustrate the sheer inhuman brutality of life in the camp. One of these photos showed a prisoner hanging from a tree by his wrists, which were tied or cuffed behind his back — one of the more painful positions into which the human body can be forced, according to the exhibit’s accompanying text.

I hadn’t thought of that image in several years — until I read this:

An Iraqi whose corpse was photographed with grinning U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib died under CIA (news – web sites) interrogation while in a position condemned by human rights groups as torture — suspended by his wrists, with his hands cuffed behind his back, according to reports reviewed by The Associated Press.

The death of the prisoner, Manadel al-Jamadi, became known last year when the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke. The U.S. military said back then that the death had been ruled a homicide. But the exact circumstances under which the man died were not disclosed at the time.

The prisoner died in a position known as “Palestinian hanging,” the documents reviewed by The AP show. It is unclear whether that position was approved by the Bush administration for use in CIA interrogations.

This is bizarre. (Possibly unsafe for work, but only mildly.) (Update: the site on the other end of that link has had a slight cosmetic makeover, though its lineage is still obvious.)

All I can say is, if you’re stealing code from this site, you’ve got to be really desperate. (…given that this site is held together with duct tape and chewing gum. It’s a cargo cult of a website, hillbilly html at its best — for which I take full responsibility. Really need to get an actual webmaster one of these days.)

Hat tip to Jen Sorensen, who made the discovery via the hits she was getting from the stolen blogad.

(…speaking of: go buy Jen’s book. Seriously. She’s really, really good, and it’s a good bet that if you like my stuff, you’ll like hers. So, go. Now. Buy.)