Dickie's Quickies

Here's an interesting short story from the BBC. What impresses me about this story is not that Starbucks is not going to sell Springsteen's latest CD due to explicit content on it, but rather how much Starbucks affects that market for music sales. Towards the end of the article is this line:

The chain was responsible for a quarter of all sales of the late Ray Charles final album, Genius Loves Company, which sold three million copies across the US.

That is pretty darn impressive no matter how you pour it.

Amanda has been posting a pretty challenging series of articles on the Men's Rights Movement. Part 2, 3, and 4. I agree with a lot of her points. I tend to eviscerate these folks as well. There has been one incident that I personally have knowledge of where a man went into court worried about his rights for visitation with his son, but once there the judge told the ex-wife that she and her lawyer needed to demonstrate clear reasons to prevent joint custody, which seemed fair to me. The former couple maintains joint custody of their son and have for many years.

George Bush lied about the war in Iraq. We know that and we suspect the intelligence was fixed. Now the Sunday Times in Britain has published a secret memo from the Blair government dated July 23rd, 2002 that states it clearly. I quote:

Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

Privacy? Ah, who cares about that? Boing Boing contributor Xeni has an interview with the folks at Zabasearch. Zabasearch does free searches for people by name online and provides names, birth dates, phone numbers, and addresses - going back 10 years. I tried it with a particularly elusive friend of mine and sure enough, there he is (assuming he hasn't moved...they don't have my latest address or number). They even have a link to do an paid for background check. With friends like these...when are we going to pass secure privacy laws in this country? And don't give me the line of bullshit I've been hearing lately about needing these things for business. Europe does just fine with their more stringent privacy laws. I'm not saying Europe's laws are perfect, but they certainly aren't hurting in the economic growth department with the laws that they have. Also, note the update to the article wherein someone finds inaccurate data using Zabasearch's advanced search and he cannot correct the inaccuracy.