Here’s another batch of photos I’ve been gathering over the last month or two (some of which you might have already seen on Facebook). I especially like the overly-restrictive bathroom sign demanding that I only flush toilet paper. What about the . . . ahem . . . waste material? Can’t I flush that too? I also like the ‘whole chicken’ package that adds, ‘without giblets and neck.’ So it’s not actually a whole chicken, is it?
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il is dead, according to North Korean state television. A tearful reporter announced his death to the North Korean people, stating that he died of ‘overwork’ while riding on a train on his way to provide ‘field guidance.’ A later report stated that he died of a heart attack. The government-controlled North Korean media, however, is notoriously untrustworthy. It is unclear what actually lead to Kim’s death, and the true cause of death may never be known.
Kim became North Korea’s Supreme Leader after the death of his father, Kim Il-Sung, in 1994. North Koreans suffer under a communist dictatorship with a uniquely powerful cult of personality around its leader. Kim’s birthday is a national holiday, his photos appear in nearly all public places, and many North Koreans attribute god-like qualities to him—including the ability to control the weather and set world-wide fashion trends. Meanwhile, North Koreans have essentially no civil liberties, no access to outside media or the Internet, and suffer some of the highest poverty and starvation rates in the world. Prison camps operate in the country where hundreds of thousands of political dissidents are indefinitely detained, including an estimated 50-70,000 who committed no crime other than being Christians.
North Korea has spent much of the last decade sabre-rattling, conducting its first nuclear weapons test in 2006, declaring an end of the 1953 Armistice in 2009, and torpedoing a South Korean navy ship and initiating an unprovoked attack on a South Korean island in 2010. These belligerent acts have sometimes (though not always) coincided with famines, unrest, or even Kim’s health setbacks inside North Korea, and are presumed to be intended as a ‘distraction’ for the North Korean people to shift focus away from unpleasant internal matters.
Kim’s youngest son, 27-year old Kim Jong-Un, has been formally announced as his successor. Due to North Korea’s reclusive nature and heavily-restricted media, it is unknown at this time whether Kim Jong-Un will take full power or share it in some arrangement with other members of the Kim family.
The music industry is rife with money, egos, and legal ambiguity, and it stands at the nexus between technology, business, and creativity. Every recording you hear on the radio has its ownership split a myriad of different ways. The song itself is typically owned by the songwriters who wrote it, while the recording of that song is owned by the performers who performed it, but one or the other (or both) have generally signed some or all of their rights away to one or more record companies.
And, of course, the companies are always merging, bands are always switching companies, people are joining and leaving bands, and all the big egos involved with all of this are always trying to push their rights to the limit for their own benefit. All of this makes for some of the dumbest lawsuits in history. Here are five of my favorites.
Before Rob Thomas rocketed to fame as the lead singer and songwriter behind Matchbox Twenty, he was part of an Orlando-based band called Tabitha’s Secret. One of the group’s best known tracks was called ‘3 a.m.,’ which was a Thomas composition about the frustration and loneliness he experienced when his mother was fighting life-threatening cancer. Needless to say, Thomas considered it to be a very, very personal song, and it is still a staple of his live performances today.
Tabitha’s Secret broke up when two of its members, Jay Stanley and John Goff, decided not to accept a record deal from Matt Serletic’s Melisma, a company associated with Atlantic Records. Rob Thomas and two of the band’s other members, Brian Yale and Paul Doucette, accepted the record deal and soon re-formed with two new members—Adam Gaynor and Kyle Cook. The new band was christened Matchbox Twenty and its debut album, Yourself or Someone Like You, went on to become one of the best selling albums of the 1990’s (and one of my personal favorites). One of the tracks on the new album was the aforementioned ‘3 a.m.,’ which Thomas re-recorded with his new band.
On February 27, 1933, Marinus Van der Lubbe—an unemployed bricklayer from the Netherlands with Communist sympathies—set fire to the Reichstag (Parliament) Building in Berlin. Most likely, Van der Lubbe was working alone . . . but that didn’t stop Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party cabinet from using the fire as an excuse to initiate a broad anti-Communist pogrom. Even before the Reichstag Building had been extinguished, Hitler had labeled the arson a “Communist outrage” and his underlings immediately kicked-off a series of arrests and assaults on well-known Communists and Communist sympathizers all around Germany.
Technically speaking, that initial roundup of Communists was an illegal violation of the Weimar Constitution, which was still in-force. Although Hitler was the un-elected Chancellor of Germany, the Reichstag was still a multi-party body in-which the Nazis only had thirty-two percent of the seats, and Germany was still a constitutional, democratic republic (not unlike our own). Hitler was strangely concerned with maintaining an appearance of legality as he tightened his grip on Germany so, the next day, he convinced President Paul von Hindenburg to sign the emergency Reichstag Fire Decree into law. Under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, this was perfectly legal. The decree wiped out almost all major German civil liberties and provided a legal basis for the ongoing suppression of the Nazis’ political opposition, all in the name of national security.
The decree read, in part, “It is therefore permissible to restrict the rights of personal freedom, freedom of opinion, including the freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications. Warrants for House searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.” As you might imagine, it is a real ‘red flag’ when a government begins to trample peoples’ civil liberties without any due process. It doesn’t make it any better when that government comes back later (whether 24 hours or 24 weeks or 24 months) trying to retroactively legalize that trampling.
I ended support for my No-Nonsense Weather application for HP WebOS back in August after Hewlett-Packard announced it was terminating WebOS device operations. It is, however, open-source so it had the potential to live on.
Well, I’m happy to report that Jonathan Dale has picked up development and the application will live on as Clear Weather. He has just released his first new version, 0.7.0, which takes my application, adds some bug fixes, and adds support for the TouchPad and Pre 3. It’s off to a great start.
So if you have a WebOS device, make sure to check it out!
Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.
