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Radical Conservative = Hippie?

BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | Cameron in ‘people power’ pledge

The unfettered redistribution of wealth in favor of the avaricious seems to have made bumbling fools of both American and British conservatives. Michael Steele routinely retracts any reasonable statement he might have made, and now David Cameron, the British conservative party leader, is pledging “people power” ahead of the British elections. The conservatives on the West side of the Atlantic are hell bent on defying any reasonable reform against horribly flawed and failed ideology, and those to the East of the Atlantic are proudly parroting 60s era hippie catch phrases.

Clearly, both “conservative” parties are content with inane media campaigns that they feel will buy them enough votes for power. Just as clearly, neither “conservative” is willing or able to provide a rational framework for governing and for solving national problems. Anglophone conservatives seem to have a preoccupation with political correctness rather than an obsession with ending a wealth redistribution scheme in which economically powerful entities leverage their full economic might to the detriment of the nation. Yet, somehow, they manage to convince themselves that an imaginary “liberalism” is the culprit.

Their reasons for believing that they should be taken seriously remain a mystery only to them.

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Fear of Truth

Congressional computers continue to be used to vandalize Wikipedia – Wikinews, the free news source.

It is entirely not surprising that the Congressional IP addresses belonging to those who “vandalize” Wikipedia and Wikinews belong disproportionately to Republicans. The Republicans are surpassed in their opposition to reality only by the red Chinese and the communist Cubans. Even Hugo Chavez has greater tolerance of the truth. (Which is not to say that he is tolerant of the truth.)

As if propaganda outlets like CNN, Fox “News”, network news, Rush Limbaugh and his coterie of “conservative pundits” weren’t enough, Republicans seem to feel the need to tamper with an open medium that meticulously documents the source of every minute datum entered into it.

Whether the motivation for these attempts at averting truth arises from fear or malice, the scenario bodes ill for the party of Lincoln.

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Spray On, Wax Off

BBC NEWS | Health | Spray for ‘six times longer’ sex.

Among the side effects making the list of “serious” side effects of the various erectile disorder medications like Cialis and Viagra is priapism, defined by the Merriam-Webster online dictionary as “an abnormal often painful persistent erection of the penis”.

It should come as very good news, then, that one no longer need to take these ED medication strictly to achieve the side effect. A new spray turns the trick, as it were.

Sure, it’s designed to make guys who last 15 seconds last two minutes, but you can almost here the college sex spray parties getting planned in Florida and Texas for next year’s spring break.

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The Soup Thickens

BBC NEWS | Americas | Gay marriage row at Miss USA show

You know you live in the primordial soup when a ditzy beauty queen objects to the offense that a gay gossip queen serving as a judge may have have felt at her objection to homosexuality and to gay marriage.

Should gay men be judging heterosexual female beauty pageants? Does being a gossip columnist qualify one as a judge of beauty?If yes, would this mean that American standards in beauty have been elevated, or that the “gay mafia” is exerting its influence. Should a decidedly naive beauty be disqualified from being queen for being a bigot? If yes, would this constitute an elevation of American beauty standards?

Within this primitive confusion lies the incontrovertible assertion that the Miss America Pageant represents absolutely nothing. No other fact can possibly account for the Pageant’s pathetic grasps for publicity.

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Demand Accountability

Don’t know how many people are as fed up with NPR as I am, but if you are, go to the NPR contact page, choose “share a comment” and then “The Ombudsman”, then choose Morning Edition or any program that you want to complain about, and send them the following. Just be sure to customize it for the program of your choice.

Morning Edition has been decimated. It is now two hours of garrulous banter punctuated by a few scant minutes of barely competent reportage.

The interview format is stupid. It is condescending, it is wasteful, and it is deceptive. It makes no sense to have incompetent anchors like Steve Inskeep or Rene Montaigne interview a competent reporter like Anne Garrells or Nina Totenberg. In this manner, the interview format takes time away from a perfectly competent and knowledgeable journalist. This format reduces the amount of information being reported.

The interview format is also a means of muzzling the journalist and/or deceiving your listeners. A perfect example was Linda Wertheimer’s interview with your business editor on Sunday’s Weekend Edition. The editor (whose name I can’t be bothered to look up after the embarrassing piece she delivered) gave us a rosy picture of the US as the world’s leading manufacturer. This assertion cannot be true given consolidation of the European markets. Furthermore, America’s preeminence in production does not remedy its economic ills. The drop in production–and the drop in exports–is a persistent trend. We could very well remain the world’s greatest producer and still have a shrinking economy.

Naturally, Wertheimer participated in this deceptive argument by avoiding asking any of the questions raised above. The pathetic script did not allow it, and the very existence of the script makes NPR a propaganda source.

I have gone beyond the point of halting all donations to my local NPR stations as a form of protest. I am going to start writing my politicians to kill NPR.

NPR is no longer a disinterested source of news. Its content is nearly 50% Republican propaganda, as demonstrated by the persistence of useless “analysts” like Cokie Roberts and Juan Williams. NPR no longer produces as much original reportage as it did 20 years ago. It no longer adds to what the wire services deliver to everyone effectively for free.

In as much, NPR is useless, and I want it off my precious airwaves.

If you want sentiments like mine to balloon into a movement, keep doing what you are doing.

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On News, Knowledge and Information

U.S. Broadband Is Fine, Nothing To See Here – The New York Times methodically fixing all broadband issues.. – dslreports.com

Where do you turn when you need objective assessment of the state of broadband connections in the US? Not the New York Times, apparently. Dslreports.com, by far the greatest resource in the US on evaluating your own broadband connection and determining how much value you are getting from your broadband provider does a much better job of reporting on the state of broadband connections for consumers and the state of affairs in the telecommunications industry in general than the New York Times.

In other words, if you take away the most impressive broadband countries, then dismiss our still mediocre showing as a product of geography (which doesn’t explain our record on poor urban deployment, or the successes of say, Canada), the U.S. looks pretty good. With availability and speed issues solved, that leaves just high US broadband prices left to dismiss, which Hansell apparently can’t. “On prices, unlike speeds, those tantalizing reports from overseas are correct,” he says.

Like in France, where users can get 100Mbps/50Mbps fiber service, VoIP and IPTV for $40 a month — in large part because the country took our now-scrapped attempt at local-loop unbundling and made it work. Fiber carriers who were sharing the access lines of local incumbents are now building their own networks, which resulted in strong facilities-based competition and lower prices thanks to — get ready — regulation. Which brings us back to our first sentence, and a larger point we’d be interested to see Hansell engage.

It would seem, then, that we can count on the New York Times to deliver the same sort of hard hitting journalism it delivered in the buildup to the Iraq war in 2003.

So, yes, the bottom line from the New York Times is be happy that you are paying too much for mediocre broadband service. You’re better off than Mexico, and, sure, you may be worse off than the French, but at least you don’t have to worry about that pesky regulation that guarantees your rights and the sort of regulation that makes corporations compete for your money.

The New York Times commends you for being an American. Your life is better without regulation. Being ripped off by corporations against which you are powerless is the only privilege that you have as an American. You eschew it at your own peril.

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Keeping Records

The last uptime record on my Mac has been difficult to beat. Apple has been releasing software updates requiring a reboot at a staggering pace.
Second Leopard Uptime Record

All of which is good, I suppose, but it would be nice for my Intel MacBook Pro to beat my ancient PPC Powerbook record’s uptime at least once.

As it happens, the record in this iStat Nano snapshot still dates back to the ancient PPC machine, and it still falls short of the previous record of 28 days and some change.

88 tasks, 322 threads. Not too bad for an old machine, one relegated to home entertainment center.

My old 12" Powerbook (867 MHz PowerPC) as my current home entertainment center

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Read My Lips: I Have No Balls

Steele In Serious Hot Water With Social Conservatives

In confirmation of his previous affirmation that neither he nor the Republican Party have any balls at all, Michael Steele bowed to his masters again today and withdrew his earlier assertion that he views abortion as a choice.

The choice issue cuts two ways. You can choose life, or you can choose abortion. You know, my mother chose life. So, you know, I think the power of the argument of choice boils down to stating a case for one or the other.

Are you saying you think women have the right to choose abortion?
Yeah. I mean, again, I think that’s an individual choice.

You do?
Yeah. Absolutely.

Are you saying you don’t want to overturn Roe v. Wade?
I think Roe v. Wade—as a legal matter, Roe v. Wade was a wrongly decided matter.

Okay, but if you overturn Roe v. Wade, how do women have the choice you just said they should have?
The states should make that choice. That’s what the choice is. The individual choice rests in the states. Let them decide.

The bigger story, perhaps, is the fact that the entire Republican Party apparatus is oblivious to the irony of it all: Michael Steele is a leader who is expected to obey the rank and file. Only the Republican Party apparatus–a cadre of apparent illiterates incapable of grasping the semantics or the political process of leadership–would expect full compliance with failed policies from its new leader.

The conclusion is inescapable. The party of Lincoln is now the party of slaves. Resistance is futile. You will conform.

Boy.

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Men Lust, Women Love

BBC NEWS | Europe | Two sexes ‘sin in different ways’

Countless other studies had already put statistics to this conclusion, but the Catholic Church apparently felt the need to weigh in. It is refreshing, perhaps, that the Church is finally applying statistics and (seemingly) modern surveying methods to compare quantitatively the transgressions of the sexes. It will be very interesting to see if such studies will have any impact on the severity and the frequency of punishments that the Church metes out for sinners.

Until then, the next statistical revelation from the Church will probably be that teenage (Catholic, of course) boys masturbate about a hundredfold more frequently than girls. Will the Church have the courage, however, to compare statistically how these masturbatory obsessions are distributed? Will it dare to investigate, at the risk of confirming, whether boys and girls enrolled in Catholic school are more or less sexually active, more or less sexually obsessed and more or less sexually dysfunctional than their peers in public schools?

Will the Church become supremely pragmatic and dispatch priests and bishops variously skilled in mitigating particular transgressions to geographic regions statistically more marred by such transgressions than others? Too many masturbators in Boston. Send Bishop Onan there. An epidemic of adultery in Atlanta. Send in Father Kennedy. Too much greed in Los Angeles. Send in Father Pinochet. A pride pandemic in Texas? Send in Archbishop Bush.

Will the Church ever be bold enough to investigate its population of priests and bishops for sexual peccadillos? That would be interesting.

Pedophilia incidents in Minneapolis? Next problem, please.

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GOP Declares: We Have No Balls

RNC Chief Apologizes for Ripping Rush Limbaugh – Presidential Politics | Political News – FOXNews.com

If a political party can’t muster the courage to stand up to a fat and obnoxious shithead, how on earth can it be expected to lead? What a dreadful confession for Michael Steele to make. This is a new low for the Republican Party, a party that manages to achieve a new low almost daily.

What a sad day for America when a political leader has to apologize for criticizing a worthless entertainer. Nothing could possibly be greater proof that Michael Steele and Rush Limbaugh are slaves to the same master.

Bob Morris puts a nice twist to it.

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