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:
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.
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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
...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.
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.
The "crazy but not stupid section". Welcome to the same section as the rest most of the world.
...or does it seem like the Beastie Boys weren't content showing off their fake mustache skills in the old Sabotage video?
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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.
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)
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.
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.
"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.
