Yes, Virginia, there are mutants.

And they are really scary.

Except for Jetman - he’s all about the technology.

And I was a little worried when I read about Das Uberboy until I remembered that the Supreme Court said that I can have all the guns I want and I don’t even need to form a militia.

h/t: randy

I’m taking a few days off.

See you sometime on Monday.

Have a safe and happy Independence Day.

Peace.

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning. - Rick Cook

DB shared some bad news with me today: Madam Marie, the fortune teller made famous by Bruce Springteen on his Album “Greetings From Asbury Park” has died.

ASBURY PARK, N.J. - Fortune teller Madam Marie, a figure of rock ’n’ roll mythology thanks to Bruce Springsteen, has died. She was in her mid-90s.

Sally Castello tells the Asbury Park Press that her great-grandmother, Marie Castello, died Friday. The psychic reader and adviser began telling fortunes on the Asbury Park Boardwalk in New Jersey in the 1930s.

Madam Marie became famous in 1973 when Springsteen paid homage to her in the song “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy).”

His lyric, “Did you hear, the cops finally busted Madam Marie for tellin’ fortunes better than they do,” cemented her fame.

Naturally, I don’t put any stock at all in psychics but Madam Marie almost made me want to believe in them.

That’s me back in my chubbier days behind Madam Marie’s “office” on the Boardwalk in Asbury Park.

My buddy Chuck West snapped this photo of President Bush’s motorcade passing his house in Little Rock yesterday.

Yes, that’s an Obama yard sign in Chuck’s well-manicured front yard…

The LA Times reports today that we’re spying on our new bffs, the Iraqi army:

Caught off guard by recent Iraqi military operations, the United States is using spy satellites that ordinarily are trained on adversaries to monitor the movements of the American-backed Iraqi army, current and former U.S. officials say.

The stepped-up surveillance reflects breakdowns in trust and coordination between the two forces. Officials said it was part of an expanded intelligence effort launched after American commanders were surprised by the timing of the Iraqi army’s violent push into Basra three months ago.

This reminds me of one of those rocky romantic relationships that’s just about ready to go into the toilet.

The kind where one partner suspects that the other is cheating on him and then hires a private detective to track her movements.

Or takes the far less expensive option of stalking her all by himself.

We’re going to take a break here at AGS for a few days.

This means that I’ll get to see my family, ride the bike and catch up on my reading to celebrate American’s birthday.

Tish has been pretty busy with Uplift at Harding and Alan’s been working a lot so it’s been a typical summer for us - we’ve all been moving very fast in different directions.

As the joke goes, I knew it was time to go home the other day when I saw my picture on a carton of milk.

And as much as I like my AGS students, I suspect that their parents want them more than I do right now. After the break, we’ll have another three weeks together.

I gave my students a short assignment to read over the break, so I’ll give you one too.

Complete the following sentence with five words or less: “For me, the thing I appreciate the most about being an American is ___________________”.

(That’s you, not ME).

A story in the New York Times today reports that the American military trainers in Guantánamo Bay based an entire interrogation class on a chart copied from another source.

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.

I think this is probably the same manual they used when I was going through Naval aircrew survival training in 1977.

I remember being told to never get caught in a lie because your interrogators will make your life miserable.  On the other hand, it was okay to give misleading information up to the point where they conclude that you are an idiot.

That’s always worked for ME.

But as we prepare to celebrate 232 years of freedom, the last thing thing in the world I need to know is that my government has been imitating the bad guys all these years.

I almost forgot: Happy Birthday, Canada. It’s Dominion Day.

Love your National Anthem. If you ever want to swap it for a Zamboni-load of hockey sticks, let ME know.

I think it’s funny how we both started off as British colonies and ended up with anniversaries so close together.

Nobody could have a better neighbor, eh.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them. - Galileo Galilei