All day today, I’ve heard news reports about how “the NSA spying on ordinary Americans by installing software on your computer. Stay tuned, and we’ll teach you how to remove it!”

What a load of absolute nonsense!

The plain truth: The National Security Agency is devoted to the creation, dissassembly and translation of Codes and Cryptograms. It employs some of our country’s best and brightest Linguists and Mathematicians. It is not an organization which is remotely involved in “spying;” this myth is propagated by Conspiracy Theorists and other lunatics who have repeatedly called it “No Such Agency.”

And a Cookie? A cookie is not a piece of executable code, and certainly does not fall under the category of “software.” Cookies are small files which are stored on your hard drive by a website. The most popular example is Forum software, which greets you with, “Hello, Sam!” (or whatever your name is) when you visit. MSNBC, CNN, FoxNews, CBS and ABC all use Cookies.

Cookies are not spyware, contrary to popular myth. Cookies cannot “track your internet usage,” contrary to popular myth.

The most nasty thing a cookie can do is say, “Oh, you’ve seen this banner/pop-up ad already, so we’re going to display a different one.” Nothing sinister there, other than sometimes several sites use the same source for those ads, and they can get an idea where your IP address travels within the realm of the sites they serve. Big deal!

Basically what we had here today was, “Everything that happens in Government is the fault of the President. We have no new news with which to bash said President, so let’s make a big deal out of absolutely nothing and scare the crap out people by making something up!”

It is reprehensible that so many seemingly upstanding, impartial journalists felt that it was okay to run this completely asinine story which is nothing more than a baseless lie.

I’m all for Freedom of the Press, but at this point, it’s painfully obvious that some limits are in order. The so-called journalists who keep peddling this kind of tabloid fodder as fact have made it abundantly clear that the Media as a whole cannot conduct itself in an ethical manner.

Ok, I just lost it when Nadia showed me this great photo and caption from MSN’s 2005 Year in Review.

If this unfortunate car could talk, it would probably say, Uh-oh, looks like I’ve got a smidge of skank on my hood.

Too funny… yet, somehow, fitting.

Although, considering it’s Bai Ling, she does have more of herself covered than usual.

According to a Reuters news report from early this morning, a 20-year-old German child-porn offender surrendered to Police after getting one of those annoying, fake e-mails from the Sober.Y virus. The message clearly stated that he was being investigated by the German Federal Criminal Police Office, and scared him badly enough that he decided to just go ahead, confess, and turn himself in.

Quoth a spokesman from the Paderborn police: “It just goes to show that computer worms aren’t always destructive … Here it helped us to uncover a crime which would otherwise probably have gone undetected.”

Of course, he failed to mention that blatent stupidity and severe paranoia played the biggest part. Yay!

Harry Shearer dropped a great video clip of Ann Coulter on his blog. Apparently, like many of her frequent targets — Kerry & company — she’s also unfamiliar with how Cameras work.

California geneticists have managed to get working human brain cells in mice.

Geneticist Fred Gage injected embryonic human cells into two-week-old fetal mice as they developed in the womb. When the mice matured, some human stem cells survived and became functional components of the mice’s brains and nervous systems.

The question begs to be asked as to wether these mice now show a propensity to sit on the couch with a remote control and a bag of potato chips.