A toe-tappingly titillating trade, which demonstrates that if you’re going to be a player hater, you should do it with a smile, and hopefully a strumming guitar, so we can be reminded of awful things while chuckling despite ourselves:
Do do do do doo dee do / Clinton got a blowjob!
ObWordPress: If you want to enable embedding of YouTube videos, disable the stupid GUI editor.
Thanks, gapingvoid for a Friday Afternoon Diversion. :)
The problem, in a paragraph-shaped nutshell, as described by George Packer in The New Yorker:
It is true that the presence of American troops is a source of great tension and violence in Iraq, and that overwhelming numbers of Iraqis want them to leave. But it is also true that wherever American troop levels have been reduced–in Falluja and Mosul in 2004, in Tal Afar in 2005, in Baghdad in 2006–security has deteriorated. In the absence of adequate and impartial Iraqi forces, Sunni insurgents or Shiite militias have filled the power vacuum with a reign of terror. An American withdrawal could produce the same result on a vast scale. That is why so many Iraqis, after expressing their ardent desire to see the last foreign troops leave their country, quickly add, “But not until they clean up the mess they made.” And it is why a public-service announcement scrolling across the bottom of the screen during a recent broadcast on an Iraqi network said, “The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians not comply with the orders of the Army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area.”
I know that I don’t know what the solution is. I think “bring the troops home now” is irresponsible. And nobody likes “stay the course” either, any more, which is a good thing: we need to get our collective brainpower together to find some less-bad solution to the mess. (more…)
[Here in San Francisco] they have these GIANT ballots in English, Chinese, and Spanish. Really neat! Its like a giant scantron, and it is somewhat gratifying to hold this huge five-pages of ballot in the blue secrecy folder between your hands and feel like maybe the participatory democracy thing is of some importance.
Proposition J: Shall it be city policy to call for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney?
They also do ranked-choice voting for some municipal offices, though it was a bit silly because in both cases there was only one candidate running. I suppose a really enterprising citizen could have ranked in three write-in candidates and that crazy person would already be living here anyway.
And, it is not like I’m really impressed with the Democrats, and their fear of articulating some vision of a better America, but it is nice to see the system correcting itself a bit. The best wisdom I have heard is that at least now President Bush will have a check on his power, and he’ll have to behave a bit more like a President. It seems the process has already started, as the GOP has announced that Donald Rumsfeld is going to resign.
The system works.
As far as impeaching Bush goes, I admit that is a silly ballot proposition for a municipal poll, but it is totally San Francisco, and it is a pleasing break from reading up on school bond proposals and sick leave. Unfortunately, they only had “yes” and “no” as options, I would have preferred “oh, hell yes!” (Though, I’m not sure how well that translates into Chinese.)
You hear about the three guys who hanged themselves to death at Guantanamo, using their bedsheets? You might have thought “suicide” but apparently, you were wrong:
“They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us.” – Navy Rear-Admiral Harry Harris, base commander
I myself, have been wondering about the purity of my seed since I began drinking flouridated water.
Tom has two links about South Dakota. The state outlawed abortion pretty much entirely. They only had one abortion clinic anyway. So, a chief of an Indian Reservation, is trying to open her own family planning clinic. And since Indians have limited sovereignty, she would (hopefully) be able to provide abortions on her own territory within South Dakota.
“Only in America.”
Also, I read somewhere that while the new Supreme Court is culturally conservative, they are also judicially conservative, meaning that they are more likely, most of the time, to defer to precedent, rather than to change laws based on their personal beliefs. The South Dakota thing is aimed squarely at a Supreme Court challenge to overturn Roe v Wade. Of course the trick is that the court could go either way — social conservative or judicial conservative — and if they go the latter, there is a SECOND Supreme Court precedent affirming abortion rights.
Which would pretty much make anti-abortion impossible without an Amendment.
OR, if we lose Roe v Wade is becomes a State issue . . . from the first article:
Aguilar: Tell me about your reservation and the realities women living in rural areas face in this political climate.
Fire Thunder: My reservation is 50 miles by 100 miles long. It’s a large rural community of 40,000 people and 60 percent of our people speak our language. Half of our population is under 18.
In a perfect world, if a woman is raped, she will call the police, and the police will take her to the emergency room. The emergency room will have components in place to help this woman, including the morning-after pill to prevent the pregnancy. In rural America, that doesn’t happen. Many places in rural America do not know about the morning-after pill.
On the reservation, we have to take a look at the high rates of alcohol and drug use. More often than not, young women who’ve been raped while under the influence will be blamed for being drunk. If someone is raped, especially out in the rural community, they may not report it. After three days, they’ve passed the cut-off point for taking the morning-after pill.
How many babies are conceived during the act of violence? We don’t know.
Interesting times. If we lose Roe, we will all be in the fight. And even with Roe, there is still a lot of work that needs doing.
I have no empirical evidence, but since the clock was shifted, I can report that I have found it harder to get out of bed. As a consequence, I have been missing the cut-off time to access the bus and been relying on a personal automobile to get to work. My personal energy consumption has seen a substantial increase as a result of DST.
I had weird thoughts about this problem this morning. There have been reports lately that more and more Americans are working earlier and earlier hours. Record numbers of people are now up at 6AM, 5AM . . . imagine all that energy they are burning in the morning, turning up artificial lighting and climate controls because they are up before the sun! And then going to bed when it is still light out!
Perhaps, perhaps, we would save daylight if we moved everyone’s clocks backward! We could measure average working hours each year and then adjust the DST offset so that no matter how much earlier or later people were working . . .
Of course, this stupid idea would never get enacted. Er, well, DST got enacted! How was that? Business concerns–golfers, sporting goods, and others figured than an extra hour of daylight in the afternoon would bring them greater profits. So, if we were to reverse DST . . . perhaps McDonald’s and Burger King, IHOP, Starbuck’s coffee . . . the longer the morning . . .
Knock it off with the political opportunism. The company is transferring ownership from U.K. to Emirates, and while there were two U.A.E. citizens involved in 9/11, there were more U.K. citizens involved in London. Port Security is your responsibility, and your standards for security had better add up to a lot more than “well, we don’t let no towelhaids run our ports, we only hire Uhmericans and other upstanding whiteys. And some darkies too. Well, and some Messicans. But no towelhaids, dammit!”
Timothy McVeigh was a white man. I think he killed more Americans-per-Terrorist than 9/11. It don’t matter who owns the parent company, as long as they pass security checks and whatnot, assuming those security checks are something more sophisticated than “we don’t like them A-rabs.”
Thanks,
-danny
Bloody Americans. I so hate agreeing with the President, but I got to give him credit on this one.
CHICAGO – The nationwide rush to go wireless appears poised to extend to its biggest city yet. Chicago is launching an effort to offer wireless broadband, city officials said Friday, jumping on the Wi-Fi bandwagon as similar initiatives proceed in Philadelphia, San Francisco and smaller cities.
Well, that is the coolest news about my home town that I have read in a while. Municipal WiFi? In the yuppie neighborhoods and in the ghetto? Speedy Internet for all the schoolchildren and the tourists? Amen to that!
Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, we awoke yesterday to find snow on the ground . . . in California! Well, sure it was up on Mount Diablo, and it had been rained away by the afternoon, but it merited a celebratory call home to Mom in Chicago, where there is no snow at the moment, but there is certainly cold.
Just as it was supposed to me none of our business when Bill Clinton got a blowjob, Dick Cheney is under no obligation to issue a press release when heshoots someone in the face.
Knock it off!
Thanks,
-danny
Oh, and you know what’s cool? Some Israeli is holding a Holocaust Cartoon contest open only to Jews, on the theory that Jews can beat the pants off Iranians at lampooning themselves. You know we’ll be in good shape when the Iranians sponsor some sort of Nakba Cartoon Contest.
In unrelated news, I got toldme.com hooked up with the Gmail “hosted domain” beta. I am kind of enjoying Gmail if for no other reason than it helps blow my mind, and that watery organ needs to keep limber.
In response to the row, popular Hamshahri newspaper in Iran launches a contest for cartoons of the Holocaust
And I was thinking, “this is about the only time that launching a cartoon contest about the Holocaust would be even remotely the right answer.” After all, it is always the Jews who pay the price for European anti-semitism. (That is a joke, you see, since “semitic” applies to all Middle Eastern cultures, even though it usually means “Jew.”)
But I wonder if the Muslim world will get it, when Jews across the world somehow fail to attack Iranian embassies or trample each other in the rush to condemn Iran and burn flags. Has the Iranian government closed the offending newspaper?
On the other hand, in a display of solidarity with ignorant Muslims, there are reports from Denmark that some ignorant Danes have defaced some Muslim graves. Let the healing begin!
Also, I really wish the Lego company would offer this Danish product for sale. Soon! But I suppose I’ll content myself with some butter cookies . . .
I did my best to explain . . . George Bush doesn’t hate Arab people, but after 9/11, he sees militarism as a way to gain support from the American people.
Of course, any perceived insult to Islam is a tool to control Muslim people. Muslims are now killing each other over cartoons published in a Danish newspaper. The BBC reports:
Demonstrators shouted “death to Denmark” and “death to France”. They called for the expulsion of diplomats and soldiers, who were sent by both countries as part of international efforts in the US-led “war on terror”.
“They want to test our feelings,” protester Mawli Abdul Qahar Abu Israra told the BBC.
“They want to know whether Muslims are extremists or not. Death to them and to their newspapers,” he said.
On NPR this morning, “Morning Edition” explained it something like this:
“Muslims attacked Danish embassies to protest a Danish cartoon depicting Muslims as violent people.”
But . . . what really annoys me, is that Muslims will protest cartoons that, maybe they haven’t even seen–they are not even easy to find in the Western media–which is why I posted them here . . . they are doing what they are programmed, so easily manipulated to do, by their governments, and by their media. Where are the protests when their own media routinely publish cartoons of this moral caliber? (more…)
The West’s current struggle with a murderous global Sunni Muslim insurgency and the threat of a nuclear-armed theocracy in Iran makes it clear that it’s no longer possible to overlook the culture of intolerance, hatred and xenophobia that permeates the Islamic world. The hard work of rooting those things out will have to be done by honest Muslim leaders and intellectuals willing to retrace their tradition’s steps and do the intellectual heavy lifting that participation in the modern world requires. They won’t be helped, however, if Western governments continue to pander to Islamic sensitivity while looking away from violent Islamic intolerance. They won’t be helped by European diplomats and officials who continue to ignore the officially sanctioned hate regularly directed at Jews by the Mideast’s government-controlled media, while commiserating with Muslims offended by a few cartoons in the West’s free news media.
I wrote a letter to Yahoo! today. I am curious what answer I will get:
Hello,
I live in the Bay Area. I have friends who work At Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. I am a big Google fan, but I am also all about Flickr!. I purchased an account even before Yahoo! bought them and have since written a Flickr plugin. I have followed the recent controversey over google.cn’s launch, and I have come to the conclusion that Google is doing the right thing:
They will openly censor searches in accordance with Chinese law.
They will not offer services that would put them in a position to compromise privacy: mail, blogs.
Do I need to stop using Flickr if I want to feel good about using the Internet? Do I need to encourage others to boycott Yahoo!, as consumers once boycotted companies engaged in human rights violations in South Africa?
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
-danny
Perhaps, you too, should contact Yahoo!, or perhaps Microsoft, to express your concerns. I will post any reply I receive here.
