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.
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.
…what’s happening there is most certainly not staying there any more.
This is a doppler image from this morning, showing the fug of smog and shit spewing out of Sin City. My own locale is completely occulted by the crap. The brown shit in my skies is the result of the filth oozing out of Las Vegas. That cloud of pollution is nearly two hundred miles in diameter.
Gasoline can’t hit $8.00/gallon fast enough, as far as I’m concerned.
Oh — check out this loop from the NWS. It’s even more annoying.
…however, the news that Nickelodeon is considering a show dealing with the subject of sex and love just makes me groan.
Their absolutely ludicrous treatment of the subject of youth romance with the inane, pointless Naked Brothers Band alone should warn parents about the “value” of anything else Nick execs might have to say on the topic. And to make matters worse, Britney seems to be in denial about the whole thing.*
As for the entire Spears family:
It appears the train wreck of the Spears franchise is just going to continue.
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* Though, given her tenuous grip on reality of late, this isn’t exactly surprising either.
A 10-year old Ocala [Florida] girl brought her lunch to school and a small kitchen knife to cut it. […] The student now faces a felony charge for the possession of a weapon on school property and the principal suspended her for ten days.
There’s no real need to read farther, is there?
There’s a reason people like me are needed throughout the US — people willing to adopt an older “special-needs” child as opposed to a more-or-less fresh-from-the-package infant.
Special needs is an unfortunate term to use, though, because of the ramifications associated with the phrase special education. The latter generally refers to pullout educational programs intended for developmentally-disadvantaged students, kids with diagnosable organic conditions that put them behind their peers, usually both academically and socially, and generally permanently. A much less polite term for such kids is retarded.
Special needs kids, though, in the adoption world, are basically kids old enough to remember a time before they came to live with their adoptive parent/s (with everything that implies). There’s often no other condition they have than this, but it’s enough to cause them to be defined as special-needs placements.
They almost certainly have psychological and emotional issues, yes; but these are not organic and likely can be overcome with a mix of therapy, possibly some short-term meds, and a consistent, stable and loving home life.
Where do these kids come from? Generally they’re taken from homes that are simply unsuitable for them. For instance, the young children of Jessica Botzko, who kept her sons locked into a two-by-two-foot dog cage when they misbehaved, and who may have used shock collars on them as well. She was sentenced to just below the maximum (5 years) this week for her crimes.
NEW YORK — President Mushmouth made a fool of himself on the world’s stage yet again, this time by addressing the UN General Assembly as though he felt his opinions were relevant, or spoke either for a majority of Americans or, indeed, the rest of the world.
He began by going after Myanmar, conveniently overlooking the fact that his ill-advised sally into Iraq has (sigh) made it impossible for the US to offer military or humanitarian aid to those caught in the middle of its two-decade conflict.
From there he continued his weak justifications of Iraq, segueing into the failing health of Castro and uttering words of such stupidity that Felipe Perez Roque, Cuba’s foreign minister, walked out in protest.
But the highlight of inanity came when Bush had this to say about global poverty and health crises.
When millions of children starve to death or perish from a mosquito bite, we’re not doing our duty in the world. When whole societies are cut off from the prosperity of the global economy, we’re all worse off. […] This great institution must work for great purposes: to free people from tyranny and violence, hunger and diseases, illiteracy and ignorance and poverty and despair.
Okay. Just to put things in context, this comes from the nominal leader of an administration which has seen a massive economic implosion in the wake of an unprecedented period of prosperity and growth; this is an administration which has singlehandedly undone every advance the US made on the world stage over the last five or so decades.
Ha ha, made you look. No, of course not.
The Swedish cartoonist at the centre of a row over drawings of the Prophet Muhammad says police have taken him to a secret location for his own safety.
[…]
The purported head of al-Qaeda in Iraq has offered $100,000 (£49,310) to anyone killing Mr Vilks.
Religion of Peace, huh? I’m beginning to seriously consider the likelihood that no religion is a true religion of peace. Even the “peaceful” ones like Buddhism have histories of holy wars.
There’s simply no way that we can extend the concept of tolerance to any practitioners of the following examples of egregious stupidity:
Officials at Nepal’s state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, the carrier said Tuesday.
Yep, goat sacrifice. In order to “fix” a mechanical fault with an airplane. Fly Royal Nepal! Now guaranteed 99% exorcised! (Look after the fold for an ad they might run in the future.)
(H/T Pharyngula)
Next we have this lovely little bit of coverage from Fort Lauderdale, FL, whereat asshat mayor Jim Naugle is still failing to recognize his own irrelevance. Extreme right-wing fundamentalist Christian shitbrains were siding with Naugle (and vice-versa) … dressed in masturbatory paramilitary uniforms. Apparently the “persecuted minority” Christians at Koinonia Worship Center in Pembroke Park, FL have decided they need to arm up and take the line “onward, Christian soldiers” a bit too damned seriously.
Gee, I wonder what would happen if similar behavior was observed at the local mosque.
And, of course, it wouldn’t be a roundup of religious retardation without yet another murder burning at the stake execution of witches:
Two South African women have been burned to death after a group of students accused them of bewitching their high school with evil spirits.
We’re putting up with this shit … why again, exactly?
The most interesting questions come your way when you’re a graphics geek with 15 years’ experience in video, multimedia programming and web design.
We’ve got an internal voice-command messaging system that allows various people to be wirelessly contacted and communicated with. Called Vocera, I think the system is viewed as a bit of a Morton’s fork. It’s easier and much more information-rich than being paged, but at least as irritating as having a cellular phone that never stops ringing.
Vocera needs a little training, and to that end they supply a video; but the DVD itself is annoyingly limited. After all, it’s a DVD. How do you make it freely available to hundreds of people any time, anywhere, simultaneously if necessary?
Right. So here’s where I come in.
There are rippers out there, of course; but that is just too goddamn easy. Windows, remember? See, those rippers transcode to MP4. Well, Windows Media Player does not handle MP4, at least not natively, sort of like how a rhino does not handle a human baby with a great deal of grace or, indeed, survivability.
This discovery led to a whole series of steps, none of which involved too much heavy liquor use,* but many of which were unnecessary.
Thus, following is a description of how to convert a DVD video file to a video format that can be played back in Windows Media Player. Note that you do not have to follow all the steps I did. In fact, strictly speaking — and assuming you have VLC, a shweet open-source multiplatform video playback and transcode utility — you could skip straight to step 16.
But golly, what’s the fun in that?
Oh — I’m running Mac OSX 10.4.10, which significantly limited my range of transcode options.**
The most recent GWB-related news is that Bush 41 is now “pained” at how reviled his son is.
We’re reminded that Daddy is 83 delicate years old; we’re supposed, I guess, to feel some kind of sympathy for the old man, and translate that into Good Feeling for his inbred retard of a moron son.
Well, let’s think about that for a minute.
Poor Daddy. Poor, poor Daddy. Gee, where was he when he should have been showing his son, at the age of ten or so, that tossing a ball around in the backyard meant give and take?
Where was he when he should have been reminding his son, at fourteen years old or so, that manhood did not necessarily mean finding the least popular kid and trying to beat him up?
Why, exactly, was Duh-bya so mysteriously absent from service in Viet Nam — and from the ANG duty he was supposed to have been pulling in its stead?
And how, please tell me how, is this touchy-feely bullshit supposed to erase the last seven years?
Feel sorry for Bush 41?
No.
I damn him.
And I damn his child, as well.
And I damn, especially, the “news” “media” which has shamelessly tried to spin a father’s masturbatory fear for his son’s failures into political capital.
Bush wept; Jesus wept much harder, and for a better reason too.
“Liberal media” my ass.
