Rumors of MSIE killing Netscape were not wrong, merely mistimed...

by let's say ten frigging years!

NEW YORK (AP) Netscape Navigator, the world's first commercial Web browser and the launch pad of the Internet boom, will be pulled off life support Feb. 1 after a 13-year run.

In other related news Scott McNealy, Marc Andreessen, and Larry Ellison were revealed to have been brain-dead and on life support themselves for many many years, but that life support would continue for them despite it being fairly evident that their failure to carpe diem way back when against a demonstrably screwed up Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Windows 95 constituted a professional and intellectual blue screen of death.

Nevertheless, well wishers are advised to send condolence gifts to the not-yet-deceased by buying their products and services out of sympathy to the stockholders unfortunately still burdened by their dubious leadership.

A blog comment list that sparked me

It was this post at Lakewood Shmuck. If you read the first five comments, mine would have been six. Mine was six actually, but here's what I would have posted had I not said, "hmmm... maybe it belongs in my blog..."

Which party is selling more lies, more despair, and less hope? Hands down, that's the Democrats. They're the party of selfishness, think only of yourself, talk big about multiculturalism but in reality look down on them, etc.

The Dems are the ones who cozy up to people who throw stones at organized religion when it is Christians and then in the same breath defend Christians, but damn them with mealy-mouth backhanded praise, and mostly those that send them money. Hypocrites have no better model than them.

You think those same people won't eventually pillory Jews and Muslims too? They already patronize them, and encourage their youth to abscond away from the faiths, ridicule is coming. The average liberal thinks you're stupid to believe in G-d. Well, subconsciously that's because it profits them more to get you to believe in them. I was raised in poverty and take it from me, they aren't selling help, they're selling desperate dependency.

On the other hand you have the Republicans who are like your refrigerator contents through a blender for five minutes and don't know what they want to be and have had anything they had good to sell hijacked by Bush's neocons and sullied... Even the high lord of Democratic politics, JFK, was in favor of low taxes and low spending, and less government. Now he's been rewritten into a socialist. However, those ideas work when not sabotaged by one side or another. Bush's biggest failure is precisely his lack of taking charge and letting slimy leeches run the show.

Bah. Like the Aliens Versus Predator poster went, Whoever Wins, We Lose.

I wish Connecticut's governor Jodi Rell was running. Or Joseph Lieberman. Someone I respect or can at least tolerate. I wonder if they'll have a "None of the Above" entry this year...

BTW, America first sort of feelings were what delayed the US entry into WWII more than anything else. If it wasn't for the US entering at all, Nazi Germany would have taken England within a few more months, established a solid presence, and become a fact of life in the world too late to go to war to erase without greater loss than had they done it earlier. AND the horrors of the holocaust would have been buried and erased if they'd been given more time.

Lastly, liberalism of today is NOT what it was many decades ago. It is a hellish pot of reeking sewage of socialism, leftist theorizing, and above all else, empowering someone other than you. Anyone who'd try to convince an American that the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights aren't pre-existing natural if not G-d given rights and NOT privileges handed out by a benevolent state is selling lies.

Put another way, how would you like a movement that tried to sell young Jews the idea that their life and all the goodness in it wasn't something courtesy of a benevolent and loving G-d, but actually privileged good times courtesy of the government?

Man did that comment chain rankle. Here's my comment I put in.

Whoever Wins, We Lose. So sayeth the Aliens Versus Predator poster of great wisdom.

Remember the first rule of politics and worthiness: no one who would accept the job deserves it and those who actively seek it doubly so.

Also before anyone gets their knickers in a twist over the Repos, the Dems are the party that wants you to believe the Bill of Rights is a Bill of Privileges Thanks to a Benevolent State. Side with them, and your freedom of religion will be sooner or later history as the religion of liberals is politics and the gods of it themselves and they cannot abide or suffer competition.
Refer to line one.

NEVER make the mistake of thinking that liberalism is okay or can be reformed. It CAN'T as long as it pretends to be what it isn't and that's kind, generous, good, loving, holy, understanding, equitable, egalitarian, enlightened, etc.

This is EXACTLY why you should look askance at rabbis and priests who in response to your questions either infer or tell you directly that you should shut up and accept their wisdom. G-d's power needs no fear, needs no defense by mere mortals against it. In a world of primitive superstition and fear, of bloody human and other sacrifices did spring up the idea that there was one G-d, and that G-d was paying attention, and being good and righteous mattered. So powerful was He, that His word pushed through the grime and blood of our primitive ancestors' world.

SO, never fear to explore, question, and learn for yourself. G-d doesn't fear that, neither should you. You think Orthodoxy seems questionable sometimes? Liberalism is Orthodoxy Ultra Unleaded. You don't want to trade one for another. Especially one that transfers the ultimate position of power from your free will governed by your conscience under G-d to the proven wrong political imaginings of self-aggrandizing faithless fools.

My musical recommendation of the moment: Black Stone Cherry

Home page.

Wikipedia entry.

Currently available on Yahoo Launchcast.

This band's work rocks, rocks hard, and in a way you thought was dead and buried. It has the soul and strength that sounds of those with true passion for the moment of the song. In acting some actors are so good at what they do, for the time of the play they ARE that character. In music, the analogue is what we get with Black Stone Cherry.

So far my two favorites are Tired of the Rain and Hell and High Water.

I'm really happy with their work and looking forward to more. With the recent resurgence of adult contemporary alternative music, with the continued post-Audioslave work of Chris Cornell as well as the Foo Fighters still performing, I think the market could be ripe for them.

Enjoy.

del.icio.us Tags: Black Stone Cherry,modern rock,alternative rock,hard rock

Making a Martyr of Bhutto - Yahoo! News

Bhutto is dead. Why why why..?

Haqqani, now a professor at Boston University, isn't sure what the latest bloodshed means for his country. "Will the Pakistani military realize that this is going to tear the fabric of the nation apart, and so really get serious about securing the country and about getting serious in dealing with the extremist jihadis?" he wondered. But he made clear he feels the best chance for such a policy has just evaporated. "She did show courage, and she was the only person who spoke out against terrorism," he said.

"She was let down by those in Washington who think that sucking up to bad governments around the world is their best policy option.

(Emphasis is mine.)

Amen Haqqani. Amen.

A customer service reminder...

...if you bend over for your customers, then the only customers you will have are those who want you to bend over. If bending over is your whole raison d'etre, hey, more power to you. If not, then how is it serving you? How is it serving them?

There's a difference between going the extra mile for someone, and going down on someone.

Report: Hoover had plan for mass arrests - Yahoo! News

Why am I seeing V for Vendetta in my head?

The plan called for the FBI to apprehend all potentially dangerous individuals whose names were on a list Hoover had been compiling for years.

"The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven percent are citizens of the United States," Hoover wrote in the now-declassified document. "In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the writ of habeas corpus.

If you thought Hoover was just a simple nutjob who abused his office and the Constitution of the United States of America to fulfill his petty kinkiness, oh no... He was a complex and farsighted nutjob who abused his office and the Constitution of the United States of America to fulfill his petty kinkiness and threaten the fabric of the public life altogether.

Remember America, NO ONE and I mean NO ONE makes world class kooks and nutjobs like we do. Al Queda should just give up now. We are able to destroy ourselves any time we want to.

Bali climate conference enters final day - Yahoo! News

Notice that they held it in a very warm place?

The negotiating agenda set at Bali, and the results of two years of negotiations to follow, will help determine for decades how well the world can hold down its rising temperatures.

It can't. Again, people are missing simple logic. There are ice ages. By simple inferences there must be other ages that are NOT ice by contrast or there's no point in call an age an ice age because there would be no other age type to give it definition.

If there's light, there must be something we call... dark.

So if we're coming out of an ice age into a not-ice age, why all the consternation? It's not science, it's do-it-yourself religion dressed up as science. Like the paganism extolled from supposed spell books at Borders Books in the wake of every Harry Potter film, it's a pop fad.

Only a few decades ago, they told us we were headed back into an ice age. Scientifically, I'll tell you that is most likely from the Vostok ice cores. The graph of temperature variations recorded there shows that as the world warms at the end of an interglacial, the warming rate increases. It's not a simple flat line or a graceful sin(x) curve.

So if you're not a toadstool or rutabaga, it might occur to you that it sounds like it is self-enhancing somehow. That the warmer it gets, the easier it gets to get warmer. Yes, it is. Why? Because a bigger contributor to greenhouse warming than mankind is all around you every day: plant life.

No, I don't mean that plants put out CO2 directly in massive amounts, though they do to some degree. I mean the aftermath of plant life. Mulch.

When plant life decays, a plethora of microbes and simple cellular life feeds upon the matter and each other and each other's dead forms. This incestuous little world of everything feeding on everything else is what we call decomposition. Happens to animal remains like yours when you die, happens to dead grass blades, dead insects, etc.

One of the outputs is CO2. Another is methane which is an even better greenhouse gas than CO2. These processes are constant. As the Earth warms, ice melts, the line of green growing things moves north and south (depending on the side of the equator) and uphill towards the mountain tops.

More plants, more mulch, more greenhouse gases. Soon it gets to a critical point and the world heads towards cold again.

Back to the story. They held it someplace warm. Bali. Hmmm... How warm is Bali? This is how warm Bali is. That's about 80° F for those not on the metric system. Where will they hold it next?

The Europeans and others showed little enthusiasm for this "voluntary" approach, and environmentalists denounced it as an effort to subvert the U.N. climate treaty process. It remains to be seen whether EU countries will attend the next meeting, in Honolulu in late January.

Honolulu has these average temperatures. Of course holding a global warming conference in Buffalo, NY in January would just not have the same effect, would it? They might actually start thinking that not everywhere on Earth is warm or warm year round. Yes, there are seasons, variations... What else might people learn if they asked questions?

ChanukahHouse

Did you see Keeping Up With the Steins?¹

This could easily be the material for a sequel. Imagine Jeremy Piven and Garry Marshall fighting it out like Matthew Broderick and Danny DeVito. In California no less.

On second thought, no. Just no.

Thank you to DovBear and his blog for the post that kicked it off and caused this link to be posted in the comments as well as that commenter.

In the meantime, I direct you to the obligatory non-denominational videos for the season:

The Xmas House

Jingle Cats

Dozens of protesting teachers burn tires at entrance to Jerusalem | Jerusalem Post

So the teachers were paying attention to their own materials...

...like those regarding South African apartheid protesters, or they were merely paying attention to Palestinian youths.

This one writes itself people. Think what you will.

House vote on illegal images sweeps in Wi-Fi, Web sites | The Iconoclast - politics, law, and technology - CNET News.com

Yes, the government continues to show that we put total retards in power with less wisdom than someone who sticks their tongue to a flagpole in winter!

This is what the SAFE Act requires: Anyone providing an "electronic communication service" or "remote computing service" to the public who learns about the transmission or storage of information about certain illegal activities or an illegal image must (a) register their name, mailing address, phone number, and fax number with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's "CyberTipline" and (b) "make a report" to the CyberTipline that (c) must include any information about the person or Internet address behind the suspect activity and (d) the illegal images themselves. (By the way, "electronic communications service" and "remote computing service" providers already have some reporting requirements under existing law too.)

"Who learns about" means if they do not learn then it doesn't apply to them, right? No, since our police state always assumes only head cheese could not possibly know and actively ignores that our mass media culture encourages people to effectively be as smart as head cheese (in their world, all television is Masterpiece Theater, Cliff Notes do not exist, and you are born a genius and sage and therefore have no excuse to not know, at least when it comes to your culpability in anything, never theirs).

Furthermore, you must implicate yourself by part (a) since you provided them the means to do it and the law in no way holds you harmless hence you are automatically open to being charged as an accessory.

Part (b) interestingly forces you to report yourself to a private NGO whose outlook is that you are a child molester unless G-d tells them personally, big tall beardy white guy in robes and everything, that you're not.

Part (c) goes with what I said about the assumption of your guilt. You better damn well come up with something to hang on someone else or it's your network info they are left with.

Part (d) even better yet enshrines in law that you must violate another law and must transmit copies of the illegal images to that private NGO. So you will have to posses them which is illegal, and then retransmit them, which is also illegal. You're forced to implicate yourself as an accessory, snitch on the other guy to cover your ass, then re-implicate yourself directly by committing the same crime.

Wow! We're going to fight crime by ordering you to report the crime, then perform the crime to justify reporting yourself after the fact!

Oh, but it gets better:

The definition of which images qualify as illegal is expansive. It includes obvious child pornography, meaning photographs and videos of children being molested. But it also includes photographs of fully clothed minors in overly "lascivious" poses, and certain obscene visual depictions including a "drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting." (Yes, that covers the subset of anime called hentai).

For the record, courts have held that hentai, while distasteful, is not in fact actionable. Were they to do so, furry fandom (look it up, I dare you) would replace Al Queda as public enemy organization number one.

As one poster in the comments put it, the alternative is to report every single piece of information, image, etc. and bury them in it. Another one would be for an enterprising ne'er do well to write a viral worm that distributed kiddie pron images like spam.

However, I think that yet again, this shows we're going to have to fight back ala Ghost In The Shell with cyber-revolution and hide everything, even when there's nothing to hide, simply because it is our nothing.

This quote is important I feel:

V: Good evening, London. Allow me first to apologize for this interruption. I do, like many of you, appreciate the comforts of every day routine- the security of the familiar, the tranquility of repetition. I enjoy them as much as any bloke. But in the spirit of commemoration, thereby those important events of the past usually associated with someone's death or the end of some awful bloody struggle, a celebration of a nice holiday, I thought we could mark this November the 5th, a day that is sadly no longer remembered, by taking some time out of our daily lives to sit down and have a little chat. There are of course those who do not want us to speak. I suspect even now, orders are being shouted into telephones, and men with guns will soon be on their way. Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now high chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent. Last night I sought to end that silence. Last night I destroyed the Old Bailey, to remind this country of what it has forgotten. More than four hundred years ago a great citizen wished to embed the fifth of November forever in our memory. His hope was to remind the world that fairness, justice, and freedom are more than words, they are perspectives. So if you've seen nothing, if the crimes of this government remain unknown to you then I would suggest you allow the fifth of November to pass unmarked. But if you see what I see, if you feel as I feel, and if you would seek as I seek, then I ask you to stand beside me one year from tonight, outside the gates of Parliament, and together we shall give them a fifth of November that shall never, ever be forgot.

This is where we are headed in this country and in this world. We are letting the political class rob us of our G-d-given right to something better and they are doing it by trading fear for it and we all know after we've walked out of the dentist's office, fear is ephemeral and gone soon. We get nothing, and they get to speak for us, the decide for us, to choose for us.

We get nothing.

Further:

Valerie: It seems strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses and apologized to no one. I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish. Every inch, but one. An inch. It is small and it is fragile and it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away. We must NEVER let them take it from us. I hope that whoever you are, you escape this place. I hope that the worlds turns, and that things get better. But what I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that, even though I do not know you, and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you, I love you. With all my heart, I love you.

BitTorrent is just the beginning. Onward comes the storm of the cyber rebellions, the people fighting back against the cancer of conformity for the sake of mere survival on our knees as slaves to other men, the intellectual battles to get through the fog of laziness and fear. Onward comes the future. Onward comes the distributed net. Onward comes the blizzard.

I warned you, but you wouldn't listen. You'll just have to wait and see how it will play. I'll have nothing to do with its creation or design, but I can guarantee you it is coming. As Agent Smith would say, "not impossible... INEVITABLE."

Strip Clubs Try To Block State's $5 Charge - Houston News Story - KPRC Houston

 

Since taxing tobacco growers, distributors, and product manufacturers was so effective as a socially acceptable method of extortion, let's keep the ball rolling, right?

I love the morally clueless and totally openly avaricious nature of this line:

"I didn't hear from them then," she said. "If this money gets held up, it's very detrimental to what we're trying to do."

Because as we all know, the righteousness of your idea trumps the wrongness of using the police powers of the state to sack other people to pay for it.

Oh wait, they call that "The Ends Justify The Means" theory and it is universally held as morally repugnant. Well, universally as in everywhere outside of the spiritual space beyond the event horizon of politics.

Who is the bigger sinner? The stripper who merely shares the sight of her nude body or the crusader who uses the state to steal what doesn't belong to them and wasn't given freely based on the holy effrontery that their ideas are sacrosanct and beyond questioning and by doing so paints the common man as too stupid to be able to see it right or wrong for themselves, and those who promote the idea as being too holy to question.

Oh yes, you're using the money for "sexual assault prevention"... which will be done in what more effective way than the totally ineffective ways you've already failed at so far in your attempts at lying to the people that you're going to save them from themselves and secondly that they even need it, and thirdly that they need it from you?

Oh yes of course, there's the health care for the uninsured which already ostensibly exists and doesn't work either.

As I've said repeatedly people, the reason it doesn't work is not because of opposition and intransigence, and not because of a faulty premise and plan: IT IS BECAUSE THEY WERE NEVER TRYING TO SAVE YOU FROM YOURSELVES, GIVE YOU HEALTH CARE, PROP YOU UP ABOVE DESTITUTION WITH WELFARE, SAVE YOU FROM SEXUAL ABUSE, OR ANY OTHER SUCH THING.

What were they doing? Getting more power over you. One bit of power over you after another until neither you nor anyone else can remember ever not being under someone else's thumb. Until you work for the state, are owned by the state, and are circumscribed in all things by the state.

If you think that I fault only liberals... NO, I FAULT YOU. YOU for letting liberals do it, then conservatives, then independents, and all the others in turn, and you did it because they bribed you with promises that they never fucking delivered. You sold out yourselves and your descendants with not even thirty pieces of silver to show for it. HOW FUCKING STUPID ARE YOU???

All because they promised to screw someone else over more than you. Because they promised that those others being screwed would translate to more in your pockets, your hands. Because you believed lies that a five year old can see through. Because you believed in darkness and doubt. Because you believed them when they sold the world to you as a zero sum game. Because you believed that there was no hope. Because you believed it was expedient. Because you believed in them, obvious liars and charlatans, more than you believed in yourself, your spouse, your mate, your kids, your anything...

It is you the common person who has let this happen and you the common person who has sold us out. If you want a traitor in our midst, an anti-Christ, a Judas, a Satan, GO LOOK IN THE MIRROR. They are staring right back at you.

Sadly, so too is the messiah and sadder still is that all you see is the former and not the latter and you comfort yourself with the lie that you could not have done better when all you had to do was choose to.

That's why the age of moshiach is not in the offing. Salvation isn't predicated on need, it's predicated on ability to say enough is enough and choose differently. If you will not even in your heads and hearts do that much, just say no to yourself, then you are lost. We all are.

I plan to keep on believing somehow some way something I say will spark something in someone and they will say something that sparks a thing in someone else as it was in me when someone before said something that made a spark in me.

I plan to continue like Malcolm Reynolds. I plan to misbehave. I plan to continue like George Bernard Shaw. I plan on being the unreasonable man. I plan to continue like the Maccabees. I plan to revolt. I plan to continue like Popeye the Sailor Man. I plan to not stands no more. I plan to continue like the guy on the corner with the sign that says the world is coming to an end. I plan to tell you when shit is wrong.

No charges over online Columbine comment - Yahoo! News

 

Hey, someone remembered the First Amendment to the United States Constitution!

Okay, so it was after the fact.

Meanwhile, séances were planned to speak with the ghost of Lenny Bruce about how much the world has or has not changed.

Kangaroo farts could ease global warming | The Daily Telegraph

 

WTF is wrong with this world and the dominant species on it???

AAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!

Hello, Earth? YOUR ICE AGE IS OVER! PUT DOWN THE SNOW SHOES AND STEP AWAY FROM THE SNOW SHOVEL. PREPARE FOR WARMER WEATHER!

In a world where we are told breathlessly by brainless idiots that we dare not endanger the world with the sci-fi movie theoretical perils of genetic engineering, i.e. we dare not genetically tamper with cells to force them into stem cell format to make whatever cells we need to save the lives of the people from whom we take the cells... we are being asked to consider genetically re-engineering sheep and cows to be more like kangaroos.

Oh wait, it gets better.

Another group of scientists, meanwhile, has suggested Australians should farm fewer cattle and sheep and just eat more kangaroos.

Australians exhale CO2... should we just eat Australians and kill the whole problem all at once?

Guantanamo Bay Question Being Ignored

Since when should the USA be capturing foreign nationals on their own soil outside of enemy combatants in a declared war, and then removing them to a third location under USA control in the first place?

First of all know that I do not dispute that there are dangerous terrorist organizations in existence on Earth and that they have a vested interest in planning and executing attacks on civilians and generally causing havoc to the common peace based on their politics and mentality.

I do not dispute that the United Nations spends more of its time talking about doing things about terrorism than ever acting against said terrorists.

I do not dispute that the USA has a vested interest in attacking and removing said terrorists.

I do dispute that the USA should be holding those terrorists and apply American law to them without American legal protections.

Unfortunately, the USA's refusal to cooperate with the UN in any way regarding hammering out international laws and treaties regarding war criminals and international courts has tied off that avenue: we should be handing the terrorists over the UN control and the UN should be imprisoning these criminals against the common peace of Earth pending trial and sentence for their crimes.

Even more unfortunately, the political arms of these terrorists are adept at playing semantic and logic games of straw men and apples and oranges at the UN and the various nations that stand as proxies for them out of their own interests in getting whatever it is they want out of the USA or its allies. Heck, some of their witting or unwitting national cohorts ARE American allies.

Given that, I think the solution is obvious: capture and release... right into the UN itself in Geneva. Scoop them up, drop them off out front of the UN offices gift-wrapped.

It's either that or give them the same rights as any other arrested and detained prisoners we have in our own legal system... which would show the world that we are better because let's face it the SAS or Mossad would simply interrogate right then and there and then put a bullet in their heads, the Russians wouldn't even bother with the interrogation and just go to machine-gunning them... They'd see the higher quality of our prison systems compared to theirs... They'd be exposed to a plethora of other cultures like the Aryan Nations, the Skinheads, the Hell's Angels, and all the other prison gangs...

I'm not seeing the problem with going either way. I do see a problem with this stupid pointless obstructionist mentality of the current administration. It's a fait accompli that things will change with the next presidency. If a new method is to be instituted, let it be by this administration instead right now.

Catch and release or upgrade them to full American federal prison system inmates.

Myself, I'm going with catch and release for the amusement factor.

NancyKay Shapiro - Let's all eat trafe for Chanukah!

 

Is it me or is something in the water in the NY region?

First Stars Were Huge and Dark - Yahoo! News

 

First Stars Were Huge and Dark - Yahoo! News

Does any of this strike you as a little bizarre?

The findings suggest that dark matter particles interacted so that they "annihilated" each other, producing subatomic particles called quarks and their antimatter counterparts, antiquarks. This annihilation produced heat that would have kept the proto-stellar cloud of hydrogen and helium from cooling and shrinking and thus preventing fusion reactions from igniting.

"Dark matter particles"? WTF are they? Well, they're something invented (read pulled out of someone's ass) to account for their previous ideas about the universe being so sacrosanct that when the observations still didn't match, they had to fudge with exotic made-up nonsense.

And atheists say science doesn't involve faith in ridiculous things that not only are disproved by attempts to prove them, but inherently so... As in, every attempt at finding dark matter has totally failed to find any but usually ends up with in-your-face corrections to existing scientific theories and calculations, aka refinements.

Science is now firmly a Flying Spaghetti Monster invention... as if the whole "global warming is unnatural and created by mankind" guff wasn't enough for you.

Microsoft Live Writer...

...does NOT suck.

For one thing, I am composing this with the same colors and formatting as my blog style, downloaded to the editor with a single button push.

For another, it has plug-ins. Like this one which lets me put a rotated pic in like a Polaroid.

Did I mention that I like Something Awful's Photoshop Phriday?

Well, this editor also lets me insert book links to Amazon, maps, and let's be use right to left languages like Hebrew and Arabic properly.

I can even put in website captures if I want.

Unlike ScribeFire, it doesn't insist on bothering the reader with a "Powered by" entry. How cool is that? Yeah, you doubters would expect MS to insist on it. Nope.

All in all, I am very happy so far with this. Not too damn bad for BETA. AND... they openly call it that rather than selling it as finished product and slipping by the testing making me a guinea pig. Guess someone at Redmond realized Windows 95 chief mistake finally.

We now know which section Venezuela sits in!

The "crazy but not stupid section". Welcome to the same section as the rest most of the world.

Is it just me...

...or does it seem like the Beastie Boys weren't content showing off their fake mustache skills in the old Sabotage video?

Shoppers Living On Sidewalk For Days For IKEA Grand Opening

Yeah, there's nothing better than waiting in line for furniture... except for furniture the overpriced store is too damn lazy and self-important to put together.

Sauder + Wal-Mart + self-check-out = spending my time someplace other than in yet another que.

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Is James Blunt getting a commission?

A tale of online love inspired usually
cynical New Yorkers this week to help a young man find the girl
of his dreams after he spotted her on a crowded subway train.

All I had to do was waste my youth and nearly hit thirty before trying the personals in desperation which led to the last nine years of marriage. Who knew?

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Learn Hebrew

Learn Hebrew is a simple but very nice Flash based web site from Jacob Richman which I first began using some months ago now.

First, you can choose what amount to Flash flash cards (er, possibly redundant but... whatever) mousing over the text of which and left-clicking will cause a very clear voice to intone the selection.

Second, the voice used is very clear. Did I mention that? Okay, it bears repeating. Also, the pronunciation is in the modern Israeli Sephardic style. Shabbat is pronounced with a definite T sound and not an S. So this won't help you follow the Charedi community with the heavy Yiddish infusions, but you can figure it out.

Third, there are many different categories of cards to choose from, not just Aleph, bet, etc.

My only real problem with it, and I have this problem with every single other free Hebrew site is there is no clear set of rules and variances taught for when to use a yod or vav to indicate an extended vowel intonation or which nikkudot mean which intonation based on which letter they are used with. Shin, bet, tav is very clearly shabbat. However, why the choice of how you are suggesting the vowel sound be "ah"?

Similarly, the choice of tet or tav, vet or vav, is left unexplained. As it is somewhat strangely in the Hebrew for Dummies book. Put together, you get the problem of the spelling of vet. It starts
with a vet with tsere under it followed by a yod then a tav. I assume Israeli kids get some sort of explanation. Can I have one?

Other than that, this is a great site to start off with learning the letters. I expect more to come from Jacob's site so will be watching.

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Sex lessons for 'cranky' miners

Australian coal miners are being given lessons in foreplay and the menopause in an attempt to boost productivity.

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Sex lessons for 'cranky' miners.

Remember, when your boss tells you to get fucked, he might only be thinking of you. What swell bosses I’ve had.

JS Online: Jury finds man, 83, guilty of soliciting, but case not over yet

And reflect that whatever misfortune may be your lot
It could only be worse in Milwaukee.

JS Online: Jury finds man, 83, guilty of soliciting, but case not over yet.

(innocent whistling)

'God Hates Fags' Church Owes Man $10.9M - News Story - KPTV Portland

A grieving father won a nearly $11 million verdict Wednesday against a fundamentalist Kansas church that pickets military funerals out of a belief that the war in Iraq is a punishment for the nation's tolerance of homosexuality.

'God Hates Fags' Church Owes Man $10.9M - News Story - KPTV Portland.

 

HALLEIGHLUJAH!!!

The silent refusal of the bulk of Christianity to vehemently disavow this sort of group is as odious as the bulk of Islam refusing to vehemently disavow Al Queda and one of the things that drove me away from believing the church had one clue as to what was going on in G-d’s creation.

THEY MOCK THE FAITH FOR NO OTHER PURPOSE THAN TO SOW HATE AND DISCORD AMONG G-D’S CHILDREN FOR THEIR OWN SHRIVELED SOULS’ AMUSEMENT. Who more than they needs to be disavowed?

Letting Phelps and company get away with claiming representation of ANYTHING having to do with G-d is like opening a whorehouse at 770 Eastern Parkway. NO SUCH MOCKERY OF LOVE SHOULD EVER BE TOLERATED BY ANYONE OF CONSCIENCE. How shameful that it is the secular courts who ultimately may be the loudest voice to cry “shame on you!”

A voice of society’s disapproval is you federal jury! Go you!

If I seem upset, it is because hatred masquerading as love is one of the greatest sins one can partake of for it is a direct willful fully meant violation of opposition to the golden rule from which all else follows. It makes me roar with anger, howl with pain, and scream with outrage. You can do nothing more unG-dly than to do the opposite of the golden rule with all forethought and intent to do so knowing full well what you do except perhaps to give the aura of approval to those who do by being silent for all that evil needs to succeed is for good people to do nothing.

Teenager in go-kart leaves police standing - Yahoo! News

BERLIN (Reuters) - A teen-ager speeding through a German town in a go-kart with seven squad cars in hot pursuit managed to give the frustrated officers the slip, police said on Friday.

 BERLIN (Reuters) - A teen-ager speeding through a German town in a go-kart with seven squad cars in hot pursuit managed to give the frustrated officers the slip, police said on Friday.

Amatures. The GEICO kid would have not only lost them, he’d have put them in the wall for good measure first.

Ananova - Police chief ready for zombie attack

"People can feel confident, if zombies start invading, we'll know how to close the streets. We can get chainsaws too.

"If a swarm comes in on I-496 westbound, we'll block off the exits so they miss the city."

Ananova - Police chief ready for zombie attack.

Welcome to April of next year.

Man who had sex with bike in court - Telegraph

Man who had sex with bike in court - Telegraph

He is not the first man to be convicted of a sexual offence involving an inanimate object, however.

Karl Watkins, an electrician, was jailed for having sex with pavements in Redditch, Worcs, in 1993.

Now that is doing things the hard way.

What is up with the mixing of religion and bullshit here?

I will tell you, if you must know, and yes you must because I am the Tr1v14l Spud that I am. Or merely I must tell you. One of those.

For long long spans of time, people have sought out the meaning of their lives. Most found nothing like whatever it was Morpheus was blabbing about except colored pills might have been involved. They aren't involved with me. Those people or the pills.

What is the meaning of mine? Well, it isn't in Catholicism or Christianity. Or wasn't. Or won't be. One of those.

I was struck from a very early age with the smell of bullshit in the water coming from the directions of my parents and well, we sharks, or kids, one of those, can smell bullshit in the water and we go for the kill. Mine being that I was no longer going to go on Sunday to do the knee-board calesthenics of the Catholic church we attended because well, I was really not hip to the whole trinity thing since Jesus himself liked to contradict the church's positions on him every chance he got.

It took a lot of years to get past literalism and find the plastic reality of existentialism without sliding down the slope to self-indulgent dadaism for the sake of attention and hellraising. Along the way I was startled, depressed, angry, sad, violent, virulent, and truculent unto myself by turns until I had traipsed through my life in all directions and lost all the footprints I'd left, most especially His when He carried me.

I've not come to any sort of peace with myself and yet have achieved total inner serenity. I've railed against my drive for complacency and stood steadfast against my desire for change for the fuck of it. I have united the opposites in a mutually canceling harmony and achieved the perfect sound of silence.

Of course, as soon as I did, He spoke up and said, "I thought you'd never pick up..."

So my religious posts are moving on to...

On the road with You-Know-Who

The American Spectator

The Current Crisis: The Merry Sage of Broadcasting Excellence

"This is more fun than I've ever had in my life," Rush declared on Hannity & Colmes during their October 18 show. By then he had sixty or so bids, the highest for $851,000. He was faced with writing the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation a personal check for almost $1 million. Nonetheless he was laughing. Later he laughed even more when one of his supporters bid $2.1 million for the Democrats' epistolary assault on the First Amendment. Now Rush is out an equal amount, but all to a good cause. He can now claim responsibility for a $4.2 million fund drive for the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation. What has been the Democrats response, a matching grant? Actually Senator Harry Reid lumbered out onto the Senate floor and heaved up yet another exhalation of guff.

What Democrat has done such an act of personal charity of such potentially and in the end realized high cost to their finances like this? Anyone?

For those who don’t remember, this is Henry Waxman:

If he looks familiar, it might be because you saw Scanners.

 

In Soviet Russia...

...Slashdot probes you!

Oddly, this firewall entry:
Date: 10/25 00:27:30 Name: spp_portscan: portscan status from 66.35.250.150: 13 connections across 1 hosts: TCP(13), UDP(0)
Priority: n/a Type: n/a
IP info: n/a:n/a -> n/a:n/a
References: none found

Led to:
[someone@somebox ~]$ host 66.35.250.150
150.250.35.66.in-addr.arpa is an alias for 150.0/24.250.35.66.in-addr.arpa.
150.0/24.250.35.66.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer slashdot.org.
[someone@somebox ~]$ whois 66.35.250.150
[Querying whois.arin.net]
[whois.arin.net]
Savvis SAVVIS (NET-66-35-192-0-1)
                                                                    66.35.192.0 - 66.35.255.255
VA Software SAVV-S234813-4 (NET-66-35-250-0-1)
                                                                    66.35.250.0 - 66.35.250.255

# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2007-10-23 19:10
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.

They port scanned no less than 17 ports. Don’t believe me?

[someone@somebox ~]$ host slashdot.org
slashdot.org has address 66.35.250.150

So, anyone want to posit what the fuck they think they’re doing sending unsolicited traffic at my firewall having nothing to do with web surfing?

Slashdot | Humans Not Evolved for IT Security

So sayeth Bruce Schneier, expert!

I know how right this is. Getting my firewall installed took years of education and indoctrination by religious, educational, and parental institutions.

On TV: Networks will lose big if there's a writers strike

In layman's terms, the people who write your favorite TV shows and films are at a standoff with the people who write their checks.

No_way. What kind of G-d would let the stuff on TV happen through conscious willful rational choice??? These writers cannot possibly exist. No one is so supremely balanced between mediocrity and evil as that. Even the government can’t manage it. I could not manage it.

If this turns out to be true, that someone really concocted this crap on purpose, then we are damned and doomed, all. You could not possibly sell your soul to the devil, it would be already spoken for. Which says volumes about the gullibility of the lower realms.

“Oh great, American television viewers are in line to come in. Will someone get the pit fiends to move the 10,000 units of George Foreman cookers to the warehouse? We have new customers on the way. Whose idea was this wardship of evil anyways? We got cheated, I know it. There’ll be Survivor t-shirts littering the locker rooms now.”

Police Horrified By Grisly Remains Of Taco Bell Meal | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Though there are still no leads on who is responsible for the gruesome mess or what their motives may have been for entering the restaurant in the first place, police say they believe the incident occurred sometime between 1 and 2 a.m.

FOURTH_MEAL_THIS!.

 

First Orgy After Brian's Death Very Solemn | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

FAIRFIELD, CA—Lacking the exuberance, spontaneity, and airborne bodily fluids of previous all-night fuckfests, the first orgy since the passing of group-sex enthusiast Brian Hodge was a solemn and subdued affair, heavily lubricated sources reported Monday.

First Orgy After Brian's Death Very Solemn | The Onion - America's Finest News Source.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAAA!!!

9NEWS - Article - Sidetracks - Another town bans saggy pants

The ordinance, passed unanimously Monday by the Port Allen City Council, requires pants to be secured at the waist so they do not fall below the hips, expose underwear or create indecent exposure.

9NEWS - Article - Sidetracks - Another town bans saggy pants.

WHERE IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY WAS THIS MOVEMENT TO REGULATE PUBLIC DRESS WHEN BELLBOTTOMS WERE DE RIGEUR?

And where were these baggy pants when all the hot girls were big on wearing thongs???

I truly live on Planet of the Morons.

American kids, dumber than dirt / Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history

He cites studies, reports, hard data, from the appalling effects of television on child brain development (i.e.; any TV exposure before 6 years old and your kid's basic cognitive wiring and spatial perceptions are pretty much scrambled for life), to the fact that, because of all the insidious mandatory testing teachers are now forced to incorporate into the curriculum, of the 182 school days in a year, there are 110 when such testing is going on somewhere at Oakland High. As one of his colleagues put it, "It's like weighing a calf twice a day, but never feeding it."

American kids, dumber than dirt / Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history.

any TV exposure before 6 years old and your kid's basic cognitive wiring and spatial perceptions are pretty much scrambled for life

Absolutely. Thanks to watching television since before I could walk, that entire school report I did in fifth grade about the relativity of the Hubble constant to actual observation vis a vis the ongoing expansion of the universe and the implications of localized and macroscopic spatial distortions affecting red-shift in terms of spatial stretching as well as inherent modification of frequencies by changing electrodynamic interaction with intergalactic plasma was entirely a put-on.

Furthermore, my accuracy with a BB gun was just a fluke. Thanks to television there is no way I should have been able to keep a one inch shot group with 75% or better accuracy at 200 feet. My spatial distortion should have given me a real Ted Striker drinking problem.

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I can still spell just fine…

Back-seat toilet to end mishaps in traffic jams - Yahoo! News

But prospective customers will have to hang on until November 15, when the firm begins selling the new product online.

Back-seat toilet to end mishaps in traffic jams - Yahoo! News.

I’m not sure I can cross my legs and hop around til then.

Why not just replace the seats with toilets? Drop your pants, get in and sit down. Hair-raising near-miss? Fear not to lose composure and control. With every seat replaced by a privy seat, and a constant negative pressure maintained, farts need not be a problem in a car with windows rolled up ever again. Get pissed off at bad drivers for real. Bonus: all effluent can be used to generate methane to help power said car and keep the world green.

Prior Permission From Government to be Required for Each Flight - 10 Zen Monkeys

But it's never too late to express your outrage... against another act in the continuing project to turn the United States into North Korea.

Prior Permission From Government to be Required for Each Flight - 10 Zen Monkeys.

It is exactly this kind of dramatic over-reaction and over-blowing that makes the DoHS and TSA idiocy so dangerous. No one will be listening to the cries when the wolf finally comes round, will they?

Good going.

Singapore relaxes sex law but not for gays

Singapore on Tuesday legalised oral and anal sex between heterosexual couples but retained a law which criminalises intercourse between gay men.

Singapore relaxes sex law but not for gays.

In other news, flights from Southern California to Singapore rose over night to unprecedented levels. Singapore customs officials are said to be utterly perplexed that so many people can afford such expensive camcorders in such numbers.

Rapidshare administrators reached for antacids.

After Fight, Airport Embraces SUX Code

City leaders have scrapped plans to do away with the Sioux Gateway Airport's unflattering three-letter identifier — SUX — and instead have made it the centerpiece of the airport's new marketing campaign.

After Fight, Airport Embraces SUX Code.

“This airport sucks.”

“Yes, it is.”

“You mean yes it does.”

“What?”

Motorcyclist's horrific death brings call to ban 'cheese-cutter' barriers - 22 Oct 2007 - NZ Herald: New Zealand National news

He could recall no previous deaths of motorcyclists hitting wire barriers and did not believe they would have much more of a chance against traditional W-section steel guard-rails.

Motorcyclist's horrific death brings call to ban 'cheese-cutter' barriers - 22 Oct 2007 - NZ Herald: New Zealand National news.

Yeah… like slamming bodily into a steel barrier at highway speed is less lethal than a wire barrier. It’s either slice or smash, when you go off a motorcycle at high speed.

Want a cheese grater, fly off of a bike on a steel grid bridge and go sliding 200 feet… It HAS happened. Not pretty…

Home-made helicopters hit northern Nigeria - Yahoo! News

We don't reward talent in this country," he lamented.

Home-made helicopters hit northern Nigeria - Yahoo! News.

 

That’s okay, we don’t either. I suspect that is why phishing and scams are so common in bother countries.

Every time I get ready to write something really good...

Oh look! Shiny!

Wait, what?

Damn.

Sometimes, comparitive examples are needed to make a point...

This image was found at Judaism.com at this page.














Would the Israel Baseball League think this was an okay image for them?








Other than that, I got there because I found this after remembering this post by RR.

Oh well. I hope their teams don't take the field vowing to kill the apikorsim...

Kosher cat is...

Lolcats are where you find them.

Dogs and Rabbis - Daily Life

There's something that make us both objects of trepidation. And it's not the facial hair

Dogs and Rabbis - Daily Life.

I loved this.

In response to Party of Values at DovBear et al...

The Democrats need not proclaim "family values" or any other silly slogans. Forever now, or at least for many decades, they've positioned themselves as the holier-than-thou more-humanitarian-than-you bunch and fall miserably short of it.

You cannot provide for the poor by stealing it from someone else using the police powers of the state to enforce that theft. I was in the welfare system as a child and it is a disgraceful system that seeks to keep people in it, ignorant, unable to get or keep a job, so they need to keep getting those scraps off the nation's table by the Dem's kind largess. (Why does that sound so familiar...)

Oh thank you, Democrats, for your welfare system. I always wanted stale cheese and my mother to have just enough money to shop at the Salvation Army while the people you appoint to administer the program are getting big paychecks and living in nice houses and eating in fine restaurants.

Don't even get me started on their marketing of horrid self-destructive ideas guaranteed to disrupt and wipe out one's family to the poorest and least powerful. You don't see rich white couples being told to have sex with abandon, use contraception if you remember, and use abortion like you would a trash can when your purse has a rip and doesn't match your outfit.

Anyone who tries to be good and decent never mind righteous among their poverty cattle are derided and denounced. Publicly if Christian, privately if Jewish, patronizingly if Muslim, in line with political correctness.

I guarantee you the first people to ban your religious freedom if they had total unchallengeable power would be the Democrats for their religion is politics and given government runs on that, they have no need of any other religion. Government is their church, their synagogue, their temple. When they harken back to Kennedy's famous line, they mentally replace "country" with "government". What you can do for your government is not question their nobility and humanitarian holiness. They are better than you and they went to a good liberal arts college so they know more than you. Trust them. Question nothing.

And I guarantee you that they privately had no problem with remarks about Joseph Lieberman's faith and level of observance and his commitment to Israel in the most snide and anti-religious ways not to mention questioning his allegiance and his very humanity for being a Jew so openly. As if being a Jew should be something one should hide. I know, I was in the middle of an extremely Democrat town during his victory by the people over the left's pundits.

The antisemitism and reflexive anti-Israel on every issue nature of the radical left has been very much on display.

Dov, the whole point of politics is to conserve power to those at the top. WHOEVER wins, we lose. They should ALL be considered fundamentally corrupt from the start and have to prove themselves otherwise by their actions. In that, nearly every politician fails miserably of whatever party.

I've found my picture!

I have mixed feelings over this, but one does what one must...

Matisyahu leaves Chabad

"What we do is not at all about Judaism and not about Chabad. It's much bigger than one religion or another," he said. "It relies on something real that can speak to anybody. It's about truth and memory."

I am now preparing to slog through blogs which wildly cheer this or boo this on both sides of the affiliation and observance fences by getting my psychic football helmet on.

Though, it isn’t as though I didn’t foresee it in a sort of paranoid worrying way. Young and estranged to begin with, then jumping headlong into Chabad seemed like trying to make peace with your self-doubt by joining the USMC.

I want Chabad people and Chasidim in general to understand I do not intend insult by that comparison. Structure and discipline are not easy and sometimes they are at odds with some people and their needs. G-d go with Matt and his search for peace with himself.

SSDD Ad Nauseum In The East

Abbas wants return to pre-1967.

Israeli government spokeswoman Miri Eisin declined to comment, saying she did not want to prejudice negotiations. But the Palestinian demands appear to exceed anything that Israel would be willing to offer.

You don’t say.

Well, for those dreaming that Abbas would be the man to stand up to the internal pressure cooker of his people’s politics and be anything like reasonable… well, you’re probably already too delusional to let this change your mind or even slow you down a little.

Nevertheless, you might want to remember Aesop’s fable about the dog that lost a bone when he barked at a reflection of himself in the water. Losing what you have to get what you won’t is not a wise trade. Israel is the only side that has done any bending, and given the last time they bent till they broke ended up in the Holocaust, I rather think the drive to survive will not allow another break.

So what happens when spring steel is bent back until it can’t be pushed farther? Well, you keep it there and if you relax your grip for one second, it pushes back and flattens you.

Like I said, Aesop’s fable…

What I am drooling over now...

ArtScroll.com -- COMPLETE FULL SIZE SCHOTTENSTEIN EDITION OF THE TALMUD ENGLISH - 73 VOLUMES.

I can smell the exciting learning from here, and that is NOT sarcasm.

An Un-Orthodox Divorce

Sieger’s close-quarter domestic skirmishing has escalated into a legal war that raises disturbing questions about the rights of Orthodox women, the integrity of the rabbinic courts, known as the betei din, and the ethics of a number of ultra-Orthodox rabbis, who stand accused by Sieger of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to issue her husband the religious divorce ruling he wanted.

An Un-Orthodox Divorce.

Every time I read this I want to cry.

I resist.

I go read The Light and Fire of the Baal Shem Tov by Yitzhak Buxbaum and pray to G-d for enlightenment like his to come again. What happened to chesed?!

All of it reminds me of the disappointing scandalous mistreatment of some of the weakest people by various churches when I was young. What happened G-d?

Defendant does push-ups in court; charges against him dropped | IndyStar.com

"It wasn't anything this court would require anybody to do."

Maybe not, but it’s a less salacious kind of drop and give me fifty sort of story than one usually expects with the justice system.

Especially ours which just the drop and give me part suggests something like… well, you know…

At our learnin' center, we'll learn ya!

Employees alleged that teenagers were doused with cold water while tied up on a concrete floor and denied access to bathrooms. One girl was forced to sit in a tub of urine, and a boy was tethered to a four-wheeler and dragged on a sand track, according to the allegations. Thayer’s owners have denied all charges.

Abuse allegations, apathy show need for ‘boot camp’ regulations.

 

This next part has me all googly-eyed.

Despite the serious concerns about Thayer, the Missouri legislature continues to resist calls to require such boarding schools to be licensed and inspected.

Are you fucking joking? We practically do anal inspections of mailmen to make sure they aren’t thinking about maybe someday porking our underage daughters in the whole Pedomania of today, but people who are holding children against their will for forcible re-education should not be licensed and inspected???

I am truly living on the planet of the morons.

Several GOP House members denounce Islam

Several GOP House members denounce Islam

Several GOP House members denounce Islam.

This is noted by the Department of Redundancy Department because of its extremely repetitive inner meanings.

Also, why don’t we get equal coverage when Democrats mouth anti-semitic remarks? Oh that’s right, the press agrees, and the Democrats are smart enough not to do it that openly. The Democrat are the SS to the Republicans’ SA. The former is craftier and the latter is street-brawler enough to make themselves obvious.

Memo to the above parties. You’re both making us look like twits. SHUT UP.

So much for religion in the public square - The Carpetbagger Report

The Family Research Council didn’t see it that way. The group flipped out, said Samuldrala’s prayer could lead to “moral relativism and ethical chaos,” and explained its belief that religious liberty “was never intended to exalt other religions to the level that Christianity holds in our country’s heritage.” In other words, as the FRC saw it, minority faiths are separate and unequal, First Amendment be damned.

So much for religion in the public square - The Carpetbagger Report.

It's this kind of thing that has made my blood boil since I was old enough to go to Sunday school. This is not, never was, by design not, a Christian nation and the most religiously observant Christians among the founders specifically did not want it to be.

It was a nation largely of Christians, but was for all, and despite the goofs, gaffes, stupid mistakes, and hateful blunders, was supposed to remain. Out of all the religions of Earth, only Christianity in America lets you become a Christian simply by saying you are. All are welcomed to the Father openly. How horrid to subvert that into the most closed of thinking and hardest of hearts like this.

Great idea, bad execution as they say. Or to steal from tech support, divine intelligence is no match for mortal stupidity.

One boob shows off two more

What else do you call it when a state pol shows off a rack in front of a school class?

My take: why the fuss over seeing titties and none whatsoever over watching war movies in history class? Death good, sex bad?

If you can't beat them in the market place of ideas

Then run away and form a new nation???

When was anyone ever promised the world would go their way and when did someone teach them that anyone else getting their way was automatically be extension them not getting theirs?

Morons.

What I believe part x of y

1. G-d exists.
   This is the fundamental assumption based on my gut feelings.
2. I exist.
   How else would I write this?
3. G-d has a nature He did not make for Himself.
   How can the Uncreated Creator make a nature for Himself? That which is, is.
4. G-d made me in His image.
   That means I have his nature, not that He has two legs and two arms nor that he likes blue jeans, although He might.
5. G-d made me to help Him figure out what His nature is.
   If you want to know what you look like, you look in a mirror. If you want to understand a crime scene, you recreate the scene. If you want to know yourself, study those like yourself and in His case, create them if you have to.

What is the first principle of His nature? The second?

1. He has no power greater than Himself and hence has ultimate free will to do whatever He chooses.
2. He has a nature that circumscribes His will and directs His will.
3. He has a free will that circumscribes His nature and enables or obstructs it by choice.
4. He made me with this nature.
   I have free will and a nature which complement and both reinforce and oppose each other.
5. Good or evil depend on free will choices to do or not do.
   That which is compelled has no value. If G-d made me do a thing, then I could not be blamed for G-d chose. If G-d said I should do a thing and I didn't, I chose.
6. Therefore, G-d will not make me do anything.
   G-d cannot make me do anything without abrogating my free will without which He cannot judge me as having made the choice as opposed to him.

It would, and has, taken books and books worth of print to even come close to explaining my reasoning here. It's just something you feel.

What do you do when you open mouth and insert foot in NYC?

Obviously, you then shoot yourself in the foot.

A Jewish educator who can't utter a phrase of Arabic has been tapped to head the city's controversial Arabic-themed school, officials announced yesterday.

Why?

(...)who resigned under pressure last Friday because of her remarks to The Post defending "Intifada NYC" T-shirt.

Way to go. Intifada actually IS an Arabic word, herein spelled out in English and not Arabic script because, well, I don't speak a word of it either but have the good taste not to pretend otherwise nor give a display of really poor taste (not without there being serious heartfelt humor in it). Feel free to look it up.

I knew I felt a disturbance in the force. It was as if a great many souls, Jewish or not, slapped their foreheads all at once and went "Oy!".

The biggest threat to peace isn't the Prez or Israel... it's NYC government's lack of oxygen to their collective brain cells which by now must number less than rabid fans of the great works of Uwe Boll. As an added bonus, this Arabic language school is named for a Lebanese Christian who wrote some of the most beautiful and moving poetry of our times. The Prophet was one of the books on my bedside shelf.

Is it just me or does NYC have an obsession with incongruities that ultimately serve no purpose other than to perpetuate a total lack of progress on the part of humanity?

Am I taking crazy pills? Robots needing rights? Now?

1. Our present AI research (non-classified, publicly disclosed, for the tinfoil hat crowd) is nowhere near conscious self-awareness. Let me repeat: NOWHERE NEAR.
2. Our present robotics research can barely produce walking robots, Japanese eye candy notwithstanding. We cannot produce anything like the mecha of Japanese animation. CAN NOT. We are NOWHERE NEAR being able to.

These two things in concert tell you what about the article? Read it... and then ask yourself, where are Dr. Paul Moller's personal flying vehicles we were breathlessly told would be in our garages by the mid 80s?

Yeah, technological reality isn't nearly as sexy as fantasy, but let's not keep selling fantasy as reality to a public that cannot be bothered to tear itself away from bustanutingrannysbut.com long enough to actually use one of the plethora of online mapping services before they go on a trip.

In a recent /. article...

...there was a reference to an article and the reference was called:

Subpoenas Issued Over NSA Warrantless Wiretapping

and so I respond:

It's this simple... despite the idea often held by some cultures that corruption proceeds from the top down, it is rather the other way around. The people themselves are inherently corrupt and weak. They don't want to take responsibility for themselves, they don't want to take the blame for anything that goes wrong in their lives, don't want to acknowledge their fallibility. Yet deep down, they would have to be positively not human to not know and accept all of the above, but it terrifies them. So they bide their time keeping busy until something comes along to absolve them of all that and make them feel better.

While in past times these were some other ethnic group, some other nation, the devil, etc. we have today the modern political system. Someone else has wronged you, someone else got what should have been yours, you and yours have been held back by they and theirs. All these things are open to interpretation convenient to the subject audience to which the political/avaricious/power-hungry/self-deluded are preaching. They dress up with fun-house mirror magnifications of real issues mixed with non-sequitr reasoning and provide them to the people with the dual benefits to the seller of giving the audience the needed scapegoat du jour to avoid dealing with their fallibility and culpability, as well as providing an ultimately open-ended and thus never reachable hopeful land of opportunity to permanently right all of these probably non-existent wrongs against them.

We the people let this kind of thing happen because we the people buy into this kind of thing. They aren't selling us anything we didn't buy from them. If we didn't buy it, they'd have sold us something else, probably equally odious in the end whether or not it was as obvious as this or not.

While our collective modern intellectual and psychological exhaustion with trying to make sense of our truly warped world and the people who made it and the horrors of what that says about us may not always work well and probably will not, we can at least thankfully point to that and say it is thanks to this we have the modern sense of cynicism that gives us a chance to grab the reigns solidly, and pull back from disaster. Our collective history shows we won't, but perhaps a self-derived deceptive and deluded false hope is better than one sold to us by someone else. At least when it all falls apart, we can blame it on a conspiracy of one, headed by the person staring back at us in the mirror.

We have met the enemy, and probably wondered if we needed a shave when we looked at them.

From the "Why didn't they realize how bad they suck 20 years ago?" file...

Copeland started the show off on the wrong foot, literally. He tripped as he took to the stage, and then banged his gong at the wrong time so that "the big pompous opening to the show is a damp squib."

He did not hear Summers' opening riff to "Message In a Bottle," and Sting in turn misheard Copeland's drum intro -- "so we are half a bar out of sync with each other. Andy is in Idaho."

Even their fans knew how awful they were decades ago. Maybe being that close to the speakers really does cause brain damage and deadening of discriminatory abilities like... taste, and musical timing...

Another new post of mine on /.

But have you given thought to the slippery slope?

Those "powers" will be in place for the next White House occupant.

I've said this for years and no one ever believes it. They believe the liberal claptrap that only Republicans ever violate our rights and the principles of this nation. NO SUCH THING IS TRUE. ALL politicians seek to conserve power to themselves, to attract power to themselves, to serve themselves. It is simply that the liberals have a better sounding pile of claptrap to sell. The end result is always the same: every weakening of our system in favor of statism over the individual results in an opening to further weaken it by the next opportunistic self-aggrandizing set of idiots.

The liberals are anti-porn for the political correctness angle from their feminist branch. The conservatives are anti-porn from the moral correctness angle from their fundamentalist branch. BOTH sides have horribly anti-freedom ideas that have great amounts in common and they all boil down to them, the politically avaricious, being in power and us being with none. And they do it by selling us fear. Fear of terrorism, fear of sexism, fear of immorality, fear of racism, fear, fear, fear. Above all, they sell us a way to avoid taking responsibility for our lives. They sell us guilt. They sell us the idea that the world is full of evil things, that we caused it all, and that if we just hand over the power to them, they will hide our guilt, at least until the next time they need to use it against us.

Global warming, pornography, tobacco, crime, hunger, terrorism, etc. You name it, everything brought to you in the way of rule by crisis and fear thereof is a an evil lie and myth wrapped in convenient facts and seasoned with half-truths from someone else's point of view.

They sell us temporary absolution and enable self-denial.

We don't take care of our kids, teach them about sex and death and the world, and we let the state raise them in the public schools. We let the television raise them at home. And we encourage each other to believe that we do the best job possible under impossible conditions with their tacit cooperation. We simply find scapegoats de jure to blame for it not actually working right. We clap ourselves on the back saying the spate of Internet predators is someone else's fault and not that we have handed off our nation to a Lord of the Flies existance. All in the name of we the people not holding on to the responsibility that goes with the power of individual will and self determination and they the avaricious gaining the power, for if you will not accept the responsibility, you will not hold the power with which it goes.

Yet another /. post of mine...

That's what we're becoming. So totally wrapped up in the idea that we have some sort of "right" to exist that after engaging in hundreds of years of logical scientific inquiry, finding mountains of evidence that the planet's weather is dynamic, vibrant, and above all fickle, that there are regular up and down periods of cold and hot, we then turn a blind eye to it and against everything we just spent all that time digging up, and proclaim that the world should always have been exactly as it was on June 17, 1931, in Passaic, NJ or something to that effect, and that we must move Heaven and Earth to make it stay that way.

Of course, I'm sure the ancestors of the present day people thought that as they watched the Earth begin to thaw from the last ice age, and the oceans rose to cover the continental shelves and give rise to the planet-wide myths about a globe covering flood. Except, they didn't have scientific evidence in huge piles of books showing that this sort of thing happens all the time regardless of what the bipedal monkeys are up to.

It has been warmer than this in the past. Much warmer. It has been colder than this in the past. Much colder. We know this for a fact. We know that this happens with or without our activities. And we know that there is NOTHING we can do at our present technological level about it. So why do we insist that we are the ones causing it when for over half a million years it happened several times and we've only had this supposedly evil technology for only less than

.0003 of that time?

Because the global warming is real and there are people in this world and always have been who want the masses to hand over power over their lives to them. And so they trot out to us a false premise, that we are totally responsible for an actually natural occurence in the long span of planetary history, and another one that they can save us from ourselves if only we give them the reigns of power. Seems like the phoney-baloney oil crisis that never happened in the 70s, the phoney-baloney global starvation crisis that never happened in the 60s, the phoney-baloney Communist scare of the 50s that was horsehockey, and ten million other crises.

It seems on the surface that we are supremely full of ourselves and yet in truth we are terribly dubious, completely without hope, and utterly given to embracing our own fallibility. There is no faith in ourselves in this idea that we caused global warming and still none in the idea that we can stop it. Only false hollow beliefs put forth to enrich the power of others.

Have faith in our progress and our natures that we are not so bad as we would think and as others would posit. We have greatness unknown and unmatched simply waiting to be explored. Once we dreamed of exploring the universe and doing so in style and comfort where now we dream simply of returning to primitive conditions lest Mother Earth shrug us off in anger over our insolence. Mother Earth is a nonentity and the physics of the world merely uncaring and indifferent to us. We cannot make the world stay in steady state, we can only live around it, and we are supremely capable of doing it. It was never of question if we can, but if we will.

There are problems with how we treat the environment, but growing the power of the state over the power of the individual, regressing to dreary primitive states, embracing inanities like hemp and bio diesel, and forgetting all the wonderous things we've thought up in the past to overcome each problem in turn, is to turn our back on being human, and all the best things about that. We can solve the problems and there need be no doom and gloom, and the solutions need not involve handing more power over to those who have far too much already and not nearly the wisdom to know what to properly do with it.

The world will shrug. We will move with it.

More evidence that our reasoning is seriously fucked up

(Solicitor General Paul) Clement also argued that the appeals court was correct in holding that aliens outside the United States have no rights under the U.S. Constitution.

And yet, when you go to a foreign nation where the age of consent is different and lower, if you have sex with someone of the proper age of consent in that jurisdiction, the fact that you are an American citizen means in the eyes of the US government, that you are bound by American laws and NOT the laws of the nation wherein the conduct at issue occurred.

In other words, American citizens are chattel, owned by the US government and beholden to it no matter where those citizens travel. Foreign citizens are chattel whenever captured. The ONLY difference: the US Constitution is held not to apply to them. Let me repeat, the ONLY difference between US and THEM is the federal government's whimsical interpretation of the moment as to whether the US Constitution applies to you or not.

THIS is why Guantanamo is BAD.

This is coming from a conservative Republican mind you.

From the "What possesses you, Microbrain?" file...

You cannot make this stuff up. You could try, but without an article with quoted names, no one would believe you. They watched for a half hour before calling the cops mind you and didn't pay her a dime.

What cheap bastards.

An Inconvenient Truth

Well, did you really expect him to be less of a total hypocrite than all the other politicians?

Me, I'm sitting back waiting for further warming, which has been long coming, so we can see a brief resurgence of the wine industry in south England before nature being her cyclical self goes cold again. It's happened before, it will happen again, with or without us.

So power up Al Gore!

Sort of like how Iceland is in the northern hemisphere between Alaska and Sakhalin

quoth the stupefied from the article: "The electromagnetic spectrum runs from long-wavelength radio at one end to high-energy, short-wavelength X-rays and gamma rays on the other. Between microwaves and X-rays, lie T-rays, or terahertz radiation."

In reality, also between microwaves and X-rays are infrared, visible light, and ultraviolet and in fact, these come after T-rays. T-ray sit beyond far infrared.

Did you know that New Mexico sits between California and South Carolina?

Cruel and Unusual Punishment for Fish

What a crappy way to treat your scaly friends. Sure the water will keep them from smelling the odors but the last thing they need to see is your sweaty soiled behind as you go to wipe. Bonus Problem: your average immature male will be tempted to give them a shower when they go for a whizz.

Where's Betty White and PETA on this?