Had a good day on the felt yesterday, about a grand in profit. Heading down to Bay101 in San Jose next week to try to satellite into the World Poker Tour's Shooting Star event in March.

From the report:

Yemen authorities initially described all those killed in the attack outside the city of Rad`a as "terrorists." The US government never officially acknowledged any role in the attack, but unofficially told media that the dead were militants, and that the operation targeted a "most-wanted" member of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) who was wounded and escaped.

Witnesses and relatives of the dead and wounded interviewed by Human Rights Watch in Yemen said the convoy was a wedding procession. They said everyone in the procession was a civilian, including all of the dead and injured, and that the bride received a superficial face wound.

[snip]

Human Rights Watch found that the convoy was indeed a wedding procession that was bringing the bride and family members to the groom's hometown. The procession also may have included members of AQAP, although it is not clear who they were or what was their fate. However the conflicting accounts, as well as actions of relatives and provincial authorities, suggest that some, if not all those killed and wounded were civilians.

This raises the possibility that the attack may have violated the laws of war by failing to discriminate between combatants and civilians, or by causing civilian loss disproportionate to the expected military advantage.

Neither the US government nor the Yemeni government has offered specific information that those whom the eight relatives and witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch listed as killed and injured were involved in militant activities.

Just one example of many, demonstrating Amazon's authoritarianism towards workers:

Amazon's system of employee monitoring is the most oppressive I have ever come across and combines state-of-the-art surveillance technology with the system of "functional foreman," introduced by Taylor in the workshops of the Pennsylvania machine-tool industry in the 1890s. In a fine piece of investigative reporting for the London Financial Times, economics correspondent Sarah O'Connor describes how, at Amazon's center at Rugeley, England, Amazon tags its employees with personal sat-nav (satellite navigation) computers that tell them the route they must travel to shelve consignments of goods, but also set target times for their warehouse journeys and then measure whether targets are met.

All this information is available to management in real time, and if an employee is behind schedule she will receive a text message pointing this out and telling her to reach her targets or suffer the consequences. At Amazon's depot in Allentown, Pennsylvania (of which more later), Kate Salasky worked shifts of up to eleven hours a day, mostly spent walking the length and breadth of the warehouse. In March 2011 she received a warning message from her manager, saying that she had been found unproductive during several minutes of her shift, and she was eventually fired. This employee tagging is now in operation at Amazon centers worldwide.

And at an Amazon's Augsburg Center warehouse in Germany:

Machines measured whether the packers were meeting their targets for output per hour and whether the finished packages met their targets for weight and so had been packed "the one best way." But alongside these digital controls there was a team of Taylor's "functional foremen," overseers in the full nineteenth-century sense of the term, watching the employees every second to ensure that there was no "time theft," in the language of Walmart. On the packing lines there were six such foremen, one known in Amazonspeak as a "coworker" and above him five "leads," whose collective task was to make sure that the line kept moving. Workers would be reprimanded for speaking to one another or for pausing to catch their breath (Verschnaufpause) after an especially tough packing job.

The functional foreman would record how often the packers went to the bathroom and, if they had not gone to the bathroom nearest the line, why not. The student packer also noticed how, in the manner of Jeremy Bentham's nineteenth-century panopticon, the architecture of the depot was geared to make surveillance easier, with a bridge positioned at the end of the workstation where an overseer could stand and look down on his wards. However, the task of the depot managers and supervisors was not simply to fight time theft and keep the line moving but also to find ways of making it move still faster. Sometimes this was done using the classic methods of Scientific Management, but at other times higher targets for output were simply proclaimed by management, in the manner of the Soviet workplace during the Stalin era.

Debbie Dingell, a Democratic power broker and chairwoman of the Wayne State University Board of Governors, is expected to run for Michigan's 12th Congressional District, now that her husband, U.S. Rep. John Dingell, announced his retirement Monday, political experts said. C&L

First Lady Michelle Obama has a warning for D.C. drivers: Watch out, Malia is coming.

The eldest daughter of the Obamas will be learning to drive next year, Obama said Thursday night on an appearance on "The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon," and in an effort to keep her children's life normal as possible, she wants to make sure Malia learns how to drive when she turns 16 this summer, though not in the presidential limo.

"I don't think we'll let her have that," Obama said. "One of the things I told my staff, I've told the Secret Service, is that when we're out of here in a few years, you know, they've got to be able to function as normal people. And so driving is a part of that. So we're going to have to figure that out. Ladies and gentlemen in D.C., watch out. Malia Obama on the road, kind of frightening. I have security, so I'm good."

Get your weekends on, my friends. We're all sick with head colds here, gonna stay on the couch and watch TV or read.

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"We have a pool, and a pond. A pond would be good for you." --Caddyshack, directed by H.R.

I like what Rumi says: He who laughs the most knows the most, if the laughter is sincere.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court has turned away appeals from the National Rifle Association which complained about resistance by governments and judges to the high court's recent seminal rulings declaring that Americans have a constitutional right to own a gun.

The justices on Monday let stand rulings that upheld a federal law that prevents young adults ages 18-20 from purchasing a handgun or ammunition from a licensed federal firearms dealer and a Texas regulation that prohibits most 18-to-20 year olds from carrying a handgun outside the home. TPM