Proving psychic phenomena exist

by analogy, How do you prove the existence and validity/truth of photography to a blind man. Wow, that is one powerful article. Mostly, because it's smart and on-point, but also because of the pace.

bacon-wrapped, cheese-filled, battered and fried hot dogs!!!

This was originally posted by mistake on my other me. I couldn't find a way to move the post from there to here in one or two clicks, so I've just copied and pasted ;-). So inelegant.

If syphilis were a product this is what it would look like

But you'll have to follow the link and read the article. Or, hmmm, click here for the image. I would post an IMG link there, but again, that'd be rude.

Don't go there

you're muslim, don't go to the U.S., unless you're a moron.

So they took your laptop. You didn't know they could do that? They don't have to return it to you. Don't go to the U.S. if you're muslim. Don't bring a laptop or anything you can't afford to lose if you go to the U.S. (particularly if you're muslim, but that's not a requirement, they can take your computer and not give it back regardless of your religion).

This is a government that is proud to have avoided a vote on Israel's attack on Lebanon so that the Israelis could kill more children and destroy the infrastructure of that country. This is a government that takes canadian citizens and exports them to foreign countries that will torture them (unless, of course, it chooses to torture them itself, in which case it will export them to Guantanamo or to torture chambers in Kirghiztan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Poland). Heck, this is a government that takes its own citizens and tortures them regardless of constitutional rights.

Don't go where the government is evil, man. Unless you're a moron, of course. It doesn't seem like you are. Just ignorant, are you? Well, now you know. Don't go there.

Israel is a mirror image of its patron, the U.S.A.

Israeli forces killed almost triple the number of Palestinian children in 2006 than they did the year before (141 compared to 52

Israel needs to be boycotted. The only people who should go to Israel are jews (it's their country, they should certainly go there if they want to), evangelical Christians who want to see it before it's blown up (could be a long wait, but evangelicals think it's going to be soon, in fact quite a lot of them are PRAYING for it to be soon), and other christians who aren't praying for Israel to be blown away anytime soon, but who don't care that the host country is almost (but not quite) as evil as South Africa ever was back in its apartheid days.

The United States, by giving Israel billions of dollars which Israel then uses to punish civilians and kill children is complicit in all this. Generally, and as much as possible, the U.S.A. should also be boycotted until it stops supporting evil regimes and, in fact, doing evil itself, all over the world. Let it do evil within its own borders, that's it's own business. But where it goes overseas and kills innocents there, it needs to be abused and scorned until it learns its lesson. Or at least until it retreats to its own borders.

Not particularly beyond bold, but good sense

Johanna Rothman slays a hotel restaurant stupidity dragon when she sidesteps a dumb rule and asks a gentleman if she can share his table for breakfast. Offering to not talk to him if he wasn't a morning person is a nice touch.

I'd say, "Good man!", but she isn't. I need to find an approving exclamation that doesn't sound as stupid as "Good person!" :-). Or maybe not, since I never actually say "Good Man!" to anyone, just think it. And maybe blog.

Good advice

I sent email to some friends pointing at Adzilla. The right link though was to: Design Observer where Michael McDonough discusses 10 things he wasn't taught in design school.

It's all very good advice (and the occasional pointed observation). Highly recommended.

hahaha, foxholes

I'd not heard the term foxholes before. Now that I see it in action, it seems so perfect. Fox is entertaining (because there are so many, ah, foxholes on there), it's like a trainwreck without the blood. It gets tiresome though. If they were entertaining and truthful it would be interesting, but after a while, it's just bile, lies, more bile, and more lies.

Hahaha, foxholes.

Hahaha, 300 for nerds

What 300 would be like if sparta were run by nerds

Link there because posting the img tag here when it's hosted there would be rude.

wow

I'm REALLY not into modern art and "installations". Which is why the double quotes there. But this installation, particularly the first picture, without the posters, is deep

Misleading Reddit (digg too) headlines

I saw these Dawkins quotes pointed to from reddit (and, I think maybe from Digg too, but I wasn't paying attention) as

The Most Brilliant Anti-Religious Quotation by Richard Dawkins

The link has *many* quotes. So I'm not sure which one the reddit reporter meant. Likely though, he just missed an s. There are more than 400 comments as I type, but a quick scan doesn't show anyone pointing out the missing letter. Looks like everyone cares about the substance of the site rather than the copy-editing skills of the reddit reporter.

I'd care about the substance too, but Dawkins is just an atheist evangelical/fundamentalist. Anyone that extreme is to be treated to the business end of a ten foot pole until they stop foaming at the mouth. That goes for religious evangelical/fundamentalists too. To be fair, I haven't yet been exposed to the rabid kind, only to filipino evangelical types. They're more polite and far more sensitive to my lack of interest, so I haven't had to take out the ten foot pole yet, just practice my matrix skills.

That was a mistake

An American colonel commits suicide (or perhaps was murdered by money-grubbing contractors who were stealing the U.S. blind) because he thought it would reduce his dishonor. That was a mistake. Killing himself (or allowing himself to be killed by contractors he had already put on notice for stealing U.S. government materiel) doesn't do much. It didn't even make the news until recently. And the Republican Army of the United States continues its whitewash, perhaps because general officers were criticized in (what was probably) his suicide note.

No, no. Don't shoot yourself, dumbass (yes you're dead, and you went through intense pain to get to the point of probably killing yourself, but see the ff, it was a dumbass thing to do). This enemy (your own leadership, and your own government) are insensitive to your death. Killing yourself does nothing. Better to attack. Always attack. Your leadership is insensitive to anything except their own pain. You need to make them feel that pain until they learn. If they won't learn to do the right, at least hurt them enough so that they'll shy away from doing the wrogn.

Last Call!

There's an anthology of drinking quotes here. Amusing. Not too relevant anymore. My hard drinking days are behind me. But amusing.

US Soldiers panic, kill civilians indiscriminately, destroy the evidence

I posted a question yesterday about how the U.S. military probably is killing civilians (not as indiscriminately as in the following link, but with impunity), and what do I see today but evidence of exactly that.

In Afghanistan, some U.S. soldiers were caught in a suicide bombing. They go into escape mode, which is a reasonable thing to do. They start shooting. Which would be a reasonable thing to do except the shooting was indiscriminate and innocent and weaponless civilians died.

They then forced a reported (not an American) to delete pictures he took of the aftermath.

The press is the only protection against American arrogance and overreaching, and a thin shield it is too.

Timmy-lama

Kino under Ubuntu Edgy has some problems, so I've not been able to encode videos of timmy. Til now.

American Interrogation, American Torture

The Chicago Reader has the story of an american interrogator who witnessed and performed torture in Iraq

The worst part of the story isn't even about the torture, nor even about the 500 dead he saw rottin in Fallujah. It's the stupidity and uselessness (or worse, creation of enemies where there probably weren't any before) of it all. People who clearly had no relationship with insurgents were arrested, tortured, had their bones broken and had mock executions performed. No doubt the Americans got some insurgents in the general sweeps. But it's stupid to catch 1 insurgent and 10 innocent people, and then keep them all in prison, torture them all, and maybe have only a 50% chance of finding the insurgent in that sea of people. Those 10 innocents have been made enemies for life. Killing them all won't help because all of their families have also been made enemies for life. And Iraqis have VERY LARGE EXTENDED families.

The Americans would do better for themselves to just kill everyone in that country and leave it a barren desert. Of course they won't, and so George W Bush will have his forever war on terror.

Where is American honor now? Not that I thought the U.S. government ever had any, but there was some hope for the military. If not as an institution, then perhaps individually. It seems though that the American people and their military are working with the government to bury that honor where no one will ever find it, what little is left after torturing innocents (everywhere in Afghanistan and Iraq), killing innocents (Haditha, but also far more places than are reported, no doubt), Raping innocents (and killing her parents in the other room, and telling her, while she's being raped, that her parents and siblings have been killed).

How many years did it take for the disgrace of Walter Reed to come to public attention? Two? Three? And those were American soldiers being merely left to their own devices. None were even being put under direct duress. How many tortures, massacres and rapes have American soldiers performed in Iraq and Afghanistan where their superiors turn a blind eye to, and kick reports under the carpets so that American honor is not tarnished. At Walter Reed, officers and senior NCOs were all actively ignoring the bad care that soldiers were getting. What does this say for the treatment of those who aren't even americans. If the army will do this to itself, what are they doing to those on the business end of their guns? There are already indications enough.

foreign-wife-ism's

I was reading LuminousLogic on his foreign-wife's-isms :-). It's interesting. Not as funny as it might be, but it's an honest post, not one that begs for people to laugh.

Where I live we're all foreigners (when compared to the english and the english-speaking americans). We also speak at least two languages (I speak three, some chinese and east-indian immigrants to the Philippines speak four or more). So we all have these foreign-isms.

Foreign-isms make for richer conversation. One can switch between languages in the same sentence, choosing the words that are better in whichever language. That only works when speaking to someone who has the same (or a superset) languages. The rest of the time, using a funny sounding foreign-ism from a language that isn't shared can be cute (if done sparingly). Or so my wife says :-).