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?

Sometimes they jump out at you...

"You can disagree with me about Iraq all you want, but you gotta admit I got some big ones. Even Condi here thinks so."

From the We Couldn't Get This Lucky Department...

Well, I think this makes sense in a weird way...

Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA-Executives at Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to "organize the world's information," announced Monday the latest step in their expansion effort: a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index.

BBspot - Internet to Observe National Holidays

BBspot - Internet to Observe National Holidays

Further Not Getting The Point Admissions

This yokel is yet another inductee. Farenheight 451, a book about a future where books are banned and burned, is protested for having dirty language in it. Quote: "If they can't find a book that uses clean words, they shouldn't have a book at all." Exactly the sentiments of the government burning books in Farenheight 451.

Duh.

Further Idiocy, Re: Disturbed Covers Land Of Confusion By Genesis

What the heck is this stuff? Well, I can only surmise some people have played way too much Monopoly, watched way too much History Channel, and gotten way too high on some serious drugs.

Yup, common folks are victims of some pasty white cigar smoking guys behind a lot of murderous mutant soldiers bringing war and death on the people. Little girls who look like Dora the Explorer are being urged to strap bombs on themselves by strange beardy guys. And when the revolution comes, there will be more murderous violence by the supposed downtrodden and in the end it will all be about money.

Does anyone else remember the war of San Ysidro when the US Empire opened fire on milling starving Californians, leaving a bloody mess of Jordache jeans and Birkenstock sandals? No? Me neither.

I hear Dora is nicely unexploded as well.

Handicapped Safety in Meriden

This was an impulse shoot as I left Meriden City Hall. In a city that hassles homeowners for minor infractions regarding the conditions of their houses and yards, especially poor neighborhoods like mine, I thought this was priceless. South side of Meriden City Hall, improperly installed, and completely defective current state. Put full adult weight down on this laterally as one might do in a fall, and it will go down. Note the improper Sonotube® usage. First, they are too small and guaranteed to crack with any appreciable lateral force. They should have been eight to ten inch size instead. Second, the posts must be properly centered for maximum strength. These are basics known to anyone who has ever installed a new mailbox post. How did this construction crew miss it? More to the point, how did this pass inspection? Welcome to the dystopia.

My take on... D&D Online Stormreach

This is very preliminary so I'll make it quick.

After my first evening of the 7 day free trial my verdict is: VERY GOOD, KEEP IT UP!

It was very quick to register, my cable modem got a workout downloading the 1.7 GIGABYTES of data to start, and then I waited another half hour for it to update after installation on first run. Thereafter, smooth, no crashes, pretty straightforward.

Single biggest problem: movement controls. I HATE those mouse+keyboard systems ala Doom and always have. That will never change. The ubiquitous nature of twin joystick gamepads is something they needed to take into account for a first person/third person ghost run around game like this. Why is it that the only game making proper use of a gamepad on a PC that I've yet tried is Rayman 3? One stick to control camera, another to move, several buttons to control and fire and jump. This game cries out for gamepad compatibility. I'll have to try creating a Logitech profile for this game.

As I said, VERY GOOD. I intend to buy the full game by the end of the trial. Seems worth it for the sheer amount of things to do. There's literally a quest around every corner.

My take on... Neverwinter Nights

I picked this up after seeing it on the shelves at a mall store. I'd recently gotten into playing games again when they were to be found at Best Buy for $2.99 to $5.99. Demon Stone, Silent Hill 4, so on. Not too shabby. One of the games was Baldur's Gate II, Shadows of Amn with Throne of Bhaal and I liked them a lot. They were somewhat complex to the uninitiated but I got used to them. I beat Demon Stone in two nights of after work play by the way. I highly recommend it.

Anyhow, I decided to try out Neverwinter Nights after seeing a blurb in Baldur's Gate II that you could import characters from there to Neverwinter Nights. Well, they did plan it at the time. Didn't turn out that way. They figured that since the initial module reset your character to level 1 and no inventory, why bother? Still, it would have been nice for the modules that didn't reset it. They didn't consider it at the time.

So I bought the Diamond edition and eagerly tore into it.

Whoa. Nice game. Magic weapons easily gotten, good armor, decently matched enemies and a storyline not too insulting to my intelligence.

So I beat the first adventure, finishing at level 16. Played into some of the others like Hordes of the Underdark and then went on to Infinite Dungeons and have since downloaded and installed the newest one. Go check it out for yourself, I won't tell you anything, not even the name. Two words though: rideable horses.

If you want more, just search out the site hosting tons of player made modules. I personally recommend Dances With Rogues, a really well done ADULT module centered on a female player character.

Yeah, it's short, so sue me. I never said this would be a big write-up, just my take. That take is: BUY NEVERWINTER NIGHTS. PREPARE FOR NEVERWINTER NIGHTS 2 COMING AT THE END OF THIS MONTH.