Thursday, September 02, 2010
Science!
and ...
Not so sure it’s Art, but it sure is purdy.
Whiskey
Margarita
See what comes of geeks messing about?
Wednesday, September 01, 2010
ToDaZeD Didja Know?
your pay-pahz pliz
Since Chiner is one of the countries evaluating US law via the UN Commission on Human Rights, ZZMike thought we oughta know a little about how things “works” there.
Hukou is basically a resident permit given by the government of China. It is issued on family basis. Every family have a Hukou booklet that records information about the family members, including name, birth date, relationship with each other, marriage status (and with whom if married), address and your employer…
Everyone has a Hukou in China.
Before 1980, the hukou restricted travel so much that tourism by Chinese within China was impossible. You couldn’t buy food outside your “home district.” Since, things have relaxed somewhat. Still, without a hukou stating that they are a resident of that particular area, the only work available is manual labor. No schools, no FREE state medical care. . .
ToDaZeD California *facepalm*
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.
--Herbert Spencer
Another effort in California to ban plastic bags failed in the Legislature late Tuesday night.
*clap*calp*clap*
OR *clicky*clicky*
When You're Befuddled - Ask Your Boss!
unclear. oh so verrry unclear
Oh so verrry EU.
The Obama administration however has submitted a report to the UN Commissioner on Human Rights, South African judge Navanethem Pillay, which makes direct reference to a popular Arizona immigration law aimed at tackling illegal immigration… [The report] will go before the UN Human Rights Council ... [which includes] China, Cuba, Libya, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, [who] will have a right to pass judgment over the Arizona immigration law…
The State Department has just announced that it will stand by its decision to include Arizona in its UN submission, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton strongly in favour of it.
Now lemme see… If I recall correctly, it’s a tad difficult to get in to Cuba; though it’s more difficult to get out, I hear. Traveling to China requires their permission to cross their borders. Travel in Teh Sandbox of Saud requires a search for contraband like *eek*eek* Bibles, rosaries and other [again, *eek*eek*] Christian objects. Plus a tablecloth tossed over the head.
But one thing they have in common is that they defend their borders and soverignty. Which is the goal and point of the AZ Law.
They have other things in common. Not all, but many members would dearly enjoy seeing the USofA have no borders, making it all the easier to loot and pillage.
Are we done yet??
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Noo Nooz
just what we need...
It’ll be interesting.
oo many important stories are overlooked. And too many times we see mainstream media outlets distorting facts to fit rigid agendas. Not that you’ve ever heard me complain about the media before. Okay, maybe once or twice.
But there comes a time when you have to stop complaining and do something.
Monday, August 30, 2010
ToDaZeD Creeping Incrementalism
*beep*beep*beep* Out Of Bounds!!
The Contra Costa County [CA] School District has put RFID tags into basketball jerseys which the students [preschoolers] will wear while at school. The bulk of the [$50,000] grant went towards setting up sensors around the school to read the tags and computer systems to actually monitor where each student is.
Justification for spending on this system while kidz are being required to bring their own paper, pencils, Purell and TP?
The point is to make it easier to make sure all students are accounted for. ... while the idea of attaching tracking devices to kids seems a little odd, the usage and reasoning seem sound.
Has there been a spate of lost preschoolers from classrooms that I’ve missed? How have teachers kept track of tots without these RFID tags since Time began? Did they actually learn the names of the kidz and watch them?!? That’s hard.
When I was young, we had 1 [one] teacher/tot-wrangler per 36-40 kidz: now they have 3-4 ‘teachers’ aides” per teacher/classroom and class sizes of under 20. And the kidz are coming out dumber—but that’s not important now....
Here’s what got me about this fella’s premise; and the likely reaction of most folks:
Part of why I’m not going to freak out about this is because it in no way encroaches on anyone’s reasonable expectation of privacy. ... your location at a public school isn’t exactly private information. And again, this facilitates grownups to watch kids and make sure they’re not doing dangerous things with scissors.
How a locator dot on a screen manages to carry information about running with scissors eludes me. [Are scissors still allowed on school property these daze?]
What it does do is communicate the idea to kidz early on—when it will take root solidly [*]—that The Collective has a right to know his whereabouts at all times. “For his saaaafety.”
And there’s no “camel’s nose” potential here? Right?
oh… first comment:
Problem is they’re not tracking kids, they’re tracking jerseys. Kids take clothes off. Ask a parent.
hm… Wonder what “solutions” might come up, now we’ve blown past the original premise? What’s the problem?!? I mean, it’s, like, legal and everything, right?
Not even gonna go into the fact that all the jerseys also have numbers on ‘em.
Hey—what a great way to keep track of all us stupid old people, too. [Hey—conservatives are all old, right?] Might wander out into traffic, yanno? And all us dumbass, redneck ruralites, right? Can’t have us those people wandering around loose—they might break into an enlightened urban area and distress the delicate seeensitive latte-sippers with their muddy, shit-encrusted boots, work-roughened hands and barnyard raaaacist attitudes. No good.
*"Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man”
-- Francis Xavier
Friday, August 27, 2010
You Raaaacist BassTurds!
uhm… wait
IF not wanting this to come across the border and infect US cities is raaaacist, THEN the assumption must be that this is race-based behavior.
A car bomb exploded Friday outside the television studios of CNN affiliate Televisa in Ciudad Victoria, the capital of Tamaulipas state in northeastern Mexico ...
A similar attack occurred the previous day, when a grenade was launched against the Televisa offices in the city of Matamoros, in Tamaulipas. ...
Tamaulipas is the state where authorities discovered 72 bodies this week on a ranch believed to be used by narcotraffickers. Authorities are investigating whether the 58 men and 14 women, believed to be migrants from Central and South America, were killed by the Zetas cartel.
It is classic Banana Republic Politics:
Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon have become a bloody battleground between the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, which ended an alliance earlier this year. The Zetas used to be the armed branch of the Gulf Cartel but have split off into a separate cartel.
Race-based? Not so much…
The Optics on this Metric are Teh Suxor
Oh. Come. On.
Last week it was confirmed that some departments being funded by the stimulus are indeed using the metric ‘lives touched’ - a regression from the absurd ‘jobs saved or created’, which was already a step down from the incalculable ‘jobs created’. ...
The main gist of that report [GAO on DOE] involved the cost of each job being generated by the stimulus bill - ... $194,000.
Well—they’ve touched my wallet. And my savings. Are they countig me?
"Lives Touched” is a figure that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) uses to track the amount of people who have been positively affected by the Recovery Act funds. This total would include people who have been provided full time employment (i.e. saved and created jobs) through the Recovery Act and people who at some point have supported a project funded by the Recovery Act.
Ah. That would be a ‘No,’ then.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
"Media Bias" - HA!
ha ha h… er… hm
At the HamMosque Protest Sat: Just another counter-protestor…
... a man in black shirt with a phone camera aggressively questioning and haranguing a gentleman with the sign, “No Sharia Here.” He was very aggressive, disrespectful and condescending; apparently, he did not like the man’s answers about Shariah and pushed the point: “Why do you feel threatened? What are you afraid of? Why can’t you answer my questions?”
But wait…
... observed the man in the black shirt getting into an ABC News truck ...
Go. Read. Remember: forethought… intention… complicity…
How Kewl is This!
Ohioan Alert
In 1848, Charles Fontayne and William Porter produced one of the most famous photographs in the history of the medium — a panorama spanning some 2 miles of Cincinnati waterfront. They did it with eight 6.5- by 8.5-inch daguerreotype plates, a then-new technology that in skilled hands displays mind-blowing resolution.
...
The details — down to window curtains and wheel spokes — remained crisp even at 30X magnification. The panorama could be blown up to 170 by 20 feet without losing clarity; a digicam would have to record 140,000 megapixels per shot to match that. Under the microscope, the plates revealed a vanished world, the earliest known record of an urbanizing America....
It may also be one of the earliest pictures to show free blacks, who were building a community in Cincinnati, just across the line from Kentucky slave country. A ditch running from the corner of a building down to the river — eroded by effluent from an outhouse — presages the cholera epidemic that hit the city the following year.
It's a Spate!
2 = “a sudden, almost overwhelming, outpouring” ?!?
We remember Michael Enright who put the beatdown on a cabbie while shouting “Assalamu Alaikum. Consider this a checkpoint.” But wait…
...Tuesday evening, a drunk 21-year-old student named Michael Enright allegedly attacked a cab driver in midtown Manhattan who had identified himself as a Muslim.
Well, now it’s a “spate”.
... an intoxicated man [identified as Omar Rivera] entered a mosque in Queens on Wednesday evening and proceeded to urinate on prayer rugs, ...reportedly shouted anti-Muslim epithets and called worshippers who had gathered for evening prayer “terrorists.”
...“He stuck up his middle finger and cursed at everyone,” ...“very clearly intoxicated” and had a beer bottle in his hand at the time.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
It's Just a Little Weed, Man...
what harm is it?!?
Authorities are trying to determine what’s causing an increase in violence that has left five suspects dead during raids of marijuana gardens across Northern California during the past several weeks.
...With marijuana growing suspects becoming more aggressive, members of the public are being warned to stay away from marijuana gardens in remote areas.
"The growers had constructed a cistern for the application of chemical fertilizers or pesticides through the irrigation system,” the warden said. “This application method is very dangerous to both wildlife and people who have no idea the water in the pipes is contaminated with hazardous chemicals.”
...”...The gardeners are usually armed and the chemicals they use are horribly dangerous to the environment, wildlife, and to the drinking water supply,"
“You cannot imagine the devastation that these people do to our forests. This is our land. These are our public forests that we should be able to go up there and enjoy. Yet we can’t. We’ve got armed intruders that are up there destroying it.”
...Deputies arrested nearly 100 people in OperationTrident. Sheriff Mims says all are Mexican nationals.
Each garden had a campsite, typically stocked with camping equipment and fertilizer as well as gardening chemicals illegal to use in this country.
The marijuana growers also dammed streams to divert water through miles of irrigation pipes to their crops.
The department said the gardens and campsites threatened wildlife and the environment. Some former marijuana plots that are nearly 20 years old have yet to recover fully.
The thought has been promoted that if CA chooses to legalize pot this November, all this will end. Maybe. But with CA the only ‘legal’ state to grow pot, what kind of money are we talking about? Will we have Napa-like Pot Gardens? Pot tourism? Pot ‘tastings?’ Will they stop and search every car going out of the state looking for shipments?
When ManBearPig Attacks!!
Shark Bear Week !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It’s August . . .
a 700-pound black bear ...has broken into at least 50 homes in search of food the past year, causing more than $70,000 of damage, and leaving stinky, basketball-size deposits...
...a bear matching Bubba’s description confronted a frightened homeowner, who told officials that he shot the bear between the eyes with a .44 Magnum. The bullet apparently bounced off the bear’s skull ...
“We don’t believe it’s appropriate to just start killing bears for following their noses to food,” says Ms. Bryant [of The Bear League, a nonprofit bear-safety organization]
“Right now every god-dang dead cow down in this country’s got grizzlies on them," said Mark Bruscino, a bear specialist with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department in Cody. “We’ve already had a couple of reports of bears on the gut piles of hunter-killed elk. Road-killed deer have bears on them.”
...in Yellowstone already (two mauling deaths so far)
...Full-grown Yellowstone bears can stand 6 feet tall and top 600 pounds. ...
“Pack your bear spray..."
Market Watching
wtf
[Gluskin Sheff economist David Rosenberg] calls current economic conditions “a depression, and not just some garden-variety recession,” ...
The 1929-33 recession saw six quarterly bounces in GDP with an average gain of 8 percent, sending the stock market to a 50 percent rally in early 1930 as investors thought the worst had passed.
The Hindenburg Omen... a technical indicator which uses a plethora of data to foreshadow a stock-market crash, was tripped again on Friday, marking the second time since Aug. 12 it has occurred. (It also came close on Thursday, but one of its criteria fell short.) ...
The latest trigger has prompted the Omen’s creator, Jim Miekka, to exit the market. ... “With what we have now, I think it’s possible we could get a 20% decline going into the fall,” Miekka said. “But I would expect some type of selloff and be buying at a lower price.”
So what’re we seeing, here? August doldrums? Bad economic reports? Hedgies at play? A dip to recover from before November?
Random Imagry: an old pop engine [w/ the flywheel] vs a “modern” engine with ‘puter chips, catalytic converters, restraints, governors, bells, whistles, bows, and a coffe maker…
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{/if}
