23
Jun
22
Jun
So CNN is sucking Bill off.
Some say his wealth and famous opportunism are reminiscent of the robber barons of yore. Yet here is a man who has set a goal to eradicate malaria. Rich as he is - his net worth is an estimated $50 billion - you can’t call the man greedy when he has pledged to give back to humanity all but a tiny fraction of 1% of that fortune.
Nutgraf aside, Bill Gates is a thief, self-aggrandizer and general all-around bastard. His stealing of DOS is a legendary tale; his knowledge in 1994 that Win95 would be a virus test bed of an OS is a matter of record; his callous disregard for aesthetics is obvious in every OS MS has ever made. To lionize him now and make him into a business poster boy is a bit like promoting Michelle Malkin as an ideal commentator, human being and Christian. In order to make it possible, you have to overlook basically everything that’s known, disregard years of recorded truth, and forgive every likely plausible future transgression as well.
But in the Land of the Buck, where the most profitable corporations in the last five years are all war profiteers (cf. Blackwater et. al.), I suppose MS is close to softcore porn for economists and those who like their money just a bit less bloody.
The fact that Bill likes to read and drive is just the iceberg’s tip. He’s a manipulating, scheming, greedy bastard who doesn’t spend one moment thinking about anyone but himself. If he’d been killed by a meteorite strike in 1991, you would not today have to scan every email you receive for viruses (Mac and Linux users still don’t); he doesn’t give a shit in an outhouse for what the rest of the world has to tolerate on his behalf under the tyranny of the worst OS in recorded history; and no amount of gilded storytelling will change the reality.
Saturday was the Literary Extravaganza hosted at Beale Street Brews. This was the second sortie in a fundraising effort to help students at the dojo (White Wind Tiger) pay for their fees for an upcoming tournament. Once students get past a certain rank, tournament attendance is compulsory, but the fees can run as high as $90 per entrant.
So one dojo student, in his teens, decided it might be a good idea to do some fundraisers. The first one, a car wash, went off two weeks ago and was the most successful car wash on record for the dojo. The second event, the Literary Extravaganza, was today; and it featured books for sale by the pound, as well as open poetry and fiction readings. For a town as small, remote and rural as this one is, it was amazingly well received. Between the two events, about $800 was raised. That’s not bad by most standards.
It was hot as hell today (105 in the shade), we had something on the order of half a ton of books to sell at $1.50/lb., but still the key player and organizer of the event took a little time to play with a cute little kid.
It was one of those moments that you either get or you don’t. I have a new D40 — essentially the same as the D50 I use at work, except it’s smaller and doesn’t autobracket exposure — and its combination of instant-on, autofocus, trustworthy exposure and white balance and a flexible zoom let me capture this. I had about two seconds to see the shot, turn on the camera, compose and hit the shutter — and of the pair of exposures I got, this was the better one.
Oh, the fact that the subjects were at ease helped.
This JPEG is virtually identical to the raw NEF I took off the chip; I only upped the EV by .6. I didn’t do anything else to the framing, color balance or what have you. I didn’t even need a fill flash; the shop windows reflected enough light to cover me.
Sometimes, you just get really lucky.
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summed up in the article title:
Chinese South Africans now black
The title is from the Beeb. The report is that Chinese living in SA have been officially recategorized as black in order to receive affirmative action benefits.
The sense, of course, is obvious. As far as many white people are still concerned, there’s whites … and everyone else.
It was the title on the post that got me.
“What Men Really Want for Father’s Day”
It’s pretty simple. Men aren’t complex. For birthdays, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Passover, we all want basically the same thing.
What baffles me, at least, is why this clear desire is sublimated into political agendas, subterfuge and chaos.
What do men really want for Father’s Day?
What they want every other day.
Pussy.
Right, I know — your man is Deep. He’s not so easily manipulated. He’s intelligent and good, and doesn’t think with his crotch.
Bullshit.
Men aren’t that deep in terms of personal relationships. Keep us in sex a few times a week, and we’re doing okay.
Want to give your man a gift for any holiday? Just take your clothes off.* It’s really no more complicated than that.
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* Whether you’re a man or a woman. I love finding Naked Boyfriend Surprise in my bed.
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Oh. What do I want for Father’s Day?
Even simpler.
A son.
14
Jun
I bought this artwork.
The artist’s site is here.
This is my picture. A bargain for $40 to commemorate the Weird Tales festival.
Oh … yes, it’s insane. But so am I.
14
Jun
Hmm. Okay, in Friday’s Bleat, James Lileks comments (screedifies?) on a few memes floating around that rub him the wrong way. He begins thus:
As I said on the Hewitt show tonight, I feel as if Bizarro World is slowly leaking into ours, and one day we will see Superman and note he has that ugly grey faceted skin, and wonder when that happened. Well, we just didn’t pay attention to the signs. In Bizarro World, illegal foreign combatants are granted constitutional rights; in Bizarro World, people react to high gas prices and energy shortfalls by refusing to boost domestic capacity. You have John McCain nixing ANWAR drilling and lending his sonorous monotone to cap-and-trade; you have Obama noting that gas prices rose too quickly, which presumably means he would have favored a gradual rise to ninety-buck-a-tank fill-ups; you have Speaker Pelosi vamping on the popular memes […]
A’ight, well, here’s a moderate liberal’s reply to the opening salvo.
For starters, illegal foreign combatants haven’t necessarily been granted anything. Accused or alleged illegal foreign combatants, however, have been extended the same privileges under US law that citizens of the US are supposed to have. To my mind, this makes sense; if we can’t obey our own judicial customs in prosecuting those who may be clearly guilty — if we can’t adhere to the guidelines of jurisprudence in prosecuting even the most rabid anti-US fanatic, if we have to essentially circumvent the product of decades of careful criminal-case precedent in order to obtain a conviction, it seems to me that our credibility will be significantly compromised.
That is, if we have to play a rigged game to ensure a given outcome with someone who is clearly guilty, any other prosecution we perform will immediately — and probably justifiably — be called into question. The reason we have stringent rules for prosecution, the reason we vet evidence, the reason we don’t accept testimony obtained under duress is that when we do, we don’t actually enhance the status of our cases against anyone else whose guilt or innocence is less certain.
11
Jun
Nine-year-old panda Mao Mao was buried amid much mourning and sorrow earlier this week. The animal was killed during the earthquake that hit China last month and killed nearly 30,000 people, at least a thousand of whom were kids in schools that pancaked down upon them and left them to die buried in rubble.
“You must look after her babies, OK?” said [Pandas International director Suzanne] Braden, who had arrived a day earlier to survey the quake damage and help in the recovery. “And their babies.”
Yes. Yes, let’s look after the panda babies.
After all, with a population of 1.3 billion, it’s obvious that humans are not an endangered species in China — so naturally human babies don’t need to be looked after with anywhere near as much attention. Which is why, I suppose, there’s reason to suspect the schools the children attended — and died under — were not built to code and were, in fact, essentially deathtraps.
11
Jun
Hymenoplasty is a procedure used to surgically re-create the hymen in a woman’s vagina. Muslim women in Europe are undertaking the procedure in order to circumvent their religion’s idiocy regarding virginity.
While I’ll agree that it’s no one’s business whether a woman is a virgin or not, if there’s a surgery which can be used to shoot even a small hole in small-minded bronze-age hocus-pocus, I’m all for it.
10
Jun
I’m not beating the drum for Barack, really I’m not. I liked Kucinich more than all the other candidates combined. (Even more now that he’s read articles of impeachment against the Retard in Chief. Really.) My objections to Hillary were mainly rooted in the fact that, particularly in the last month or two, she behaved more like Il Duce in his insistence on entitlement than I believe even she realized.
But Jesus, is McCain out of touch.
According to the Wind Sock, Obama would be “bad for business”. Johnny wasted no time in pulling out the standard bugaboos of Higher Taxes! and Slower Job Creation! and Sacrificing Infants to Baal!
Whereupon he reminded himself what century he was living in, and struck that last part.
While not going into particular details, MSNBC passed along the news that McCain was addressing a group of “small business owners”. Where, and to what purpose, I suppose we’re meant to speculate. But rather than point out the fact that the Fed, under Bush’s purview — and the aegis of lower taxes — has systematically gutted the Small Business Administration,1 he chose to raise the spectre of increased taxes under Obama.
While it’s true that Obama would raise taxes on higher income individuals, he’s also pledged to lower taxes for many others, and to be frank, I don’t think many of us are particularly worried about a boost in taxation on the wealthy while giving the rest of us a break for once. It would be a nice goddamn switch from the last decade.
Remember 2003? Remember when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured?
He’s the guy who apparently masterminded the hijack-crash attacks that took place on you-know-what date in 2001. He’s due to go on trial (with others) at Guantanamo soon.
Well, actually, it’s not going to be a trial — it’s going to be a tribunal. And that’s only one problem with it. Evidence to be used against him will include both hearsay claims, and confessions obtained under torture. (This according to CNN.)
Tribunals are actually not civil trials as we think we understand them in the US, and the Guantanamo approach has already been ruled unconstitutional by activist duty-doing Supreme Court judges in 2006. In a military tribunal there is no jury, and in the Guantanamo setup there may not even be full disclosure of evidence, meaning the defense might be caught flatfooted.1
Complicating things is Mohammmed’s own statement that he wants to be killed, so he can be a “martyr” to his perverse cause.
On the one hand, I’m in favor of punishing the guilty; however, our national high ground has so steadily eroded in the last six years of Bush’s stupidity that we’re actually using levees to hold back the sea. And we know how well that strategy works.
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of comment on the fact that Gm has announced a shutdown of four plants; the facilities were producing trucks and SUVs, and only an inbred cretin like Bush could possibly be surprised at the news “news” that big fat-assed gas pigging vehicles are not what we want or need on this planet. They’re even considering dumping the Hummer brand, about a decade too late for it to do anyone any good.
That this is a beautiful example of thoughtless, mindless consumerism — the ultimate outcome of pure “free market” economics — is something which seems to be escaping many people.
Ideally, a corporation’s CEO will, among other things, look to the future of his company with wisdom, or at least enough foresight to see to the end of any given decade. US automakers’ leadership, however, has been dismal; rather than realize the hard, inescapable fact (in 1998) that gas prices would never, ever go down, they chose to produce pigmobiles, and put a significant amount of material resource into their production.
And Americans, hypnotized like chickens with lines drawn before their beaks, lined up to buy the idiot machines.
