This strip goes in a different direction that you think it would at first glance. I think it's really cool.

http://capnectoplasm.deviantart.com/art/What-to-do-with-my-life-145304635

Found the original (so it says).

This is nasty stuff, and if you have an aversion to pedophilic literature, you may want to stop where the actual excerpts start.

Our President's "Safe Schools Czar" helped found GLSEN and formulated this recommended reading list of books for kids to read in school, supposedly to help gay teens feel better about themselves, and to make other kids be more understanding. But if you look at the actual books, what you find reads more like the fantasies of NAMBLA members being projected into the minds of the protagonists.

From GatewayPundit There's a part II if you find you need just a bit more to help induce vomiting.

What strikes me most about this crap is how emotionally dead, alienated, and bleak it is. And there are common themes like the rejection if the ideas of normalcy as worthless, the idea of being unable to control ones sexual urges and being swept along into gay encounters with adults, even disgusting and sleazy ones, without the slightest feeling of control, or even regret over being say, molested in a bus station restroom. You don't get the impression of the mind of a well-adjusted, happy gay teen, but of the limp, maimed soul of an abused child. If the goal of this material is to make gay children feel better about themselves and other kids be more understanding, I can't help but think that the result of the adoption of this reading list will be increased gay teen suicide, and understanding fellow students helping out them out of their misery.

And it's not so favorable.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1232485/My-generation-created-sexual-revolution--wrecking-lives-women-since.html

http://www.youtube.com/show/souleater

26 episodes dubbed are online, and the first four are also dubbed.

I've really enjoyed this one. It's got a really odd style reminiscent of FLCL but richer, a very bizarre concept, and it doesn't take place in a Japanese school. (Okay, there is SOME school in it, but not much.)

You also might want to check out the new, closer to the Manga version of Fullmetal Alchemist, 30 subbed episodes online.

Less than 10% of Obama's cabinet has private sector experience. There's a fascinating graph here. Even Kennedy, the next lowest, still had what looks like three times as many.

And these are the people who are going to help him kill save the US economy?

Okay, enough people have already talked about the CRU e-mails that show how they managed to form a "Peer Review" circle jerk and destroyed the careers of Journal editors who didn't eat the cracker for them.

But apparently that mass of "Liberated" data also included some of the programs that the CRU used to massage, smooth, puree and fabricate their global warming data.

This article at American Thinker goes over it in detail, including snippets of code that include data arrays literally NAMED Fudge Factor that clearly are used to skew data, and comments warning that all of the data after 1960 will be wrong.

Okay, look everyone, we've been had. Now stop trying to make a bad mistake worse by continuing to make policy based on this BS.

Okay, sure, clean energy and conservation and so on are worthy goals, but now that we know the whole benefit side of the cost/Benefit ratio has been utterly skewed, perhaps we can step back a moment and recalibrate.

From http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29525.html

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates Friday night filed a notice with the Supreme Court that will likely block the release of photos depicting the alleged abuse of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan by their U.S. captors.

Gates, taking advantage of an amendment to the military appropriations bill signed by President Obama last month that gives him the authority to exempt the photos from the Freedom of Information Act, called on the Supreme Court to dismiss without further consideration a lower court’s ruling that the photos must be released to the American Civil Liberties Union.

In a statement, the ACLU, which plans to file a responsive brief, argues that Gates’ filing “fails to provide the individualized assessment that the amendment's language requires and also fails to provide any basis for the claim that disclosure of the photos would harm national security.”

Obama, who’d initially cleared the photos’ release in response to court rulings, later reversed himself, saying that the pictures would "further inflame anti-American opinion" and "put our troops in greater danger."

"The government's argument for suppression of the photos sets a dangerous precedent – that the government can conceal evidence of its own misconduct precisely because the evidence powerfully documents gross abuses of power and of detainees,” said Alex Abdo, a legal fellow with the ACLU National Security Project.

In its ruling, the court of appeals accepted that the release of the 21 photographs the ACLU had specifically requested could endanger U.S. personnel overseas, but ruled that since the government had failed to identify and specific person who would be endangered that the photographs must nonetheless be released. The ACLU and the government had also agreed that the court ruling would apply to other abuse-investigation images, which could number in the hundreds.

Sections 565 (c) and (d) of the appropriations bill effectively allows Gates to override the call to identify specific individuals who could be endangered by the release of the photographs. It creates a new class of “protected document,” defined as a photograph taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009, that “relates to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained after September 11, 2001, by the Armed Forces of the United States in operations outside of the United States… for which the Secretary of Defense has issued a certification” determining “that disclosure of that photograph would endanger citizens of the United States, members of the United States Armed Forces, or employees of the United States Government deployed outside of the United States.”

The Supreme Court is expected to Gates’ brief by Monday.

Congress would never have passed such a rider before Obama. Although we still know which side the ACLU stands on, and even Obama's much-vaunted position won't stay their hand.

So, The Health care plan has a tax penalty in it for employers who do not provide health insurance for their workers. Man, that sounds like it should work! Make those greedy fat-cats pay for insurance....

That is, until you run the numbers and find out it's not so much of a tax, but an incentive to dump all your employees on the government plan, and that's a raw deal for the workers.

Edit: Got the original link http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/14/pelosis-new-payroll-tax/

Pelosi's new payroll tax
A whip for socialized medicine
Washington TImes Newspaper
By Terence P. Jeffrey
Saturday, November 14, 2009

Rep. Joseph L. Barton, Texas Republican and ranking member on the Energy and Commerce Committee, set out a startling scenario in floor debate Saturday before the House approved the health care bill pushed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The bill would slap an 8 percent tax on the payrolls of employers who do not provide health insurance to their workers and pay at least 65 percent of the premiums for an employee who has a family insurance plan and 72.5 percent of the premiums for an employee who has an individual insurance plan. Mr. Barton spelled out what he believes will happen if this provision becomes law.

Many Americans might be tempted to casually conclude that the purpose of Mrs. Pelosi's new payroll tax is to force employers to buy health insurance for their workers and that the parties hurt most by the tax would be the employers who pay it.

This is wrong on both counts. The Pelosi tax will not force employers to buy insurance for their workers; it will give them an incentive not to buy insurance. The parties most hurt by the Pelosi tax will be not the employers who pay it but the workers dumped into the government-run health care system that Mrs. Pelosi's plan creates.

This will happen when employers discover that paying Mrs. Pelosi's tax is cheaper than buying health insurance. The Pelosi payroll tax will be a whip wielded by the state to drive Americans into a socialized health care system from which there will be no escape.

In 2016, when the Pelosi plan would be in full force, the average employer-provided health insurance plan will cost $11,000 for a family and $6,000 for an individual, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Mr. Barton based his analysis on a family plan that cost only $10,000.

"The employee pays $3,500 and the employer pays $6,500," said Mr. Barton. "Since there's an 8 percent payroll tax on the [employer's] average [wage] of $40,000, that would be about $3,200. Most employers, when this plan is implemented, can pay the 8 percent tax, which is $3,200, or the $6,500 premium that they pay for their employees.

"They're going to stop providing health care ... and they're just going to put them in the public option," said Mr. Barton. "The employee is going to take that $3,500 that he or she was paying for their premium for a $10,000 plan and they're going to find out that when they go into the health care exchange, their $3,500 doesn't buy a $10,000 policy. It buys a $3,500 policy. It's a bad deal."

The deal looks even worse when you consider some of its technicalities, which are also designed to drive Americans into government-run health care.

The bill that passed the House sets up a national "health insurance exchange" run by the government. Families earning up to 400 percent of the poverty level ($88,200 for a family of four) will qualify for a federal insurance subsidy that attenuates as family income rises. But families will not get this subsidy if their employer provides them with insurance, or if they buy their insurance anywhere but in the government exchange. One of the plans in the exchange will be the "public option" run by the government itself.

The Pelosi payroll tax will be phased in for companies with annual payrolls between $500,000 and $750,000. Employers with payrolls less than $500,000 will not pay it at all. Employers with payrolls between $500,000 and $585,000 will pay 2 percent of payroll if they don't provide health insurance. Employers with payrolls between $585,000 and $670,000 will pay 4 percent. Employers with payrolls between $670,000 and $750,000 will pay 6 percent. And employers with payrolls over $750,000 will pay the full 8 percent.

An employer who has 10 employees and an annual payroll of $499,000 (or an average of $49,900 per worker) will not pay a penny of Pelosi tax if he cancels his private health insurance program and dumps his workers into the government health care system. He will also have an incentive not to give his workers a raise or to risk his own money trying to grow his business.

But assume he does give each worker a $1,000 raise at the end of the year, bringing his payroll to $509,000. In that case, he faces a choice: Either pay 65 percent of the $11,000 annual insurance premium for every one of his workers who has a family and 72.5 percent of the $6,000 premium for every worker who does not have a family - or pay the 2 percent Pelosi tax.

The Pelosi tax would only charge him a flat fee of $10,180 (2 percent of his $509,000 payroll) to offload all his workers into the government system.

Because the government-run public option would be able to undersell the government-approved private plans in the government-run insurance exchange, the government-run option would soon be the only option.

Government would control our health care from womb to tomb, a time span likely to be shortened by government care.

I made a suggestion to LiveJournal a while ago, and it's been implemented.

Basically, the posting time and date now updates continuously unless you edit it so that when you post a new entry, it has the time you hit post, rather than the time you opened the editor window in it. Hitting Edit freezes it. And you can still edit, of course. But that lets you make long, leisurely entries without them being backdated into oblivion.

So this is a film that for YEARS I've been hearing people rave about. In fact, usually with fangirlish glee.

Sorry, it may have buried in it a fairy tale, but a fairy tale of the unexpurgated Grimm type. It's really more about the mop-up by the Spanish Fascists after WWII and a really ugly situation caused by a really ugly-souled man, and an excuse for some of the most gruesome bullet wound and injury effects I've seen since Saving Private Ryan, only more intimate.

This is not the "Adult Fairy Tale" all the reviewers keep echoing each other about. The real story is about the brutality in Franco's Spain.



Spoiler space



And the ending, well, let's just say that unless you're self-deluded, the cinematography and the editing removes any doubt as to the realness of the story.

It's just gross, wet and muddy, torturous without a moment of relief, and relentlessly unhappy.

People give it amazing reviews primarily based on everyone else's brilliant reviews. You can tell by the repetition of the "Adult Fairy Tale" line. One is expected to praise this film. But it's pretty clear that the little girl is using the ideas of a fairy tale to escape from the overbearing horror of her life, and in the end, it fails her.

There ARE some amazing performances, Maribel Verdu is really the star.

I only gave it 2/5, Technically amazing, but really horrible story.

Spanish with English subtitles.

Clearwire is going to send me a new modem for free. They're switching over to WiMax, so it's mandatory. The nice thing is they will DOUBLE my bandwidth for the same price, and I will still own the new modem. 3 MBPS down, and 256K up.

I love writing this mad scientist stuff. Where else can you describe attacking a mountain with a blimp?

This is from the first entry in the series without any fetish stuff in it.

(Background bits: In his first story, Dr. Mauser stole one of the Goodyear blimps for his attack on the AFC championship game with his madness inducing beam, an offshoot of his heat ray/Stunner. It uses a flat panel emitter much like the phased array radar panels on a modern battleship. El Monstroso is another mad scientist who's been mentioned before who'd been taken out by the Forces of Justice (tm). This is from part two of a story. In the first part, Avogadro, "The Mole", gruesomely killed one of Dr. Mauser's agents with his disintegrator. This is revenge.)

---

Anjela "Angel of Death" Ramirez lowered her binoculars, and let out a low whistle. She had been in this business for a long time, but there was still nothing in the world quite like seeing two super scientists going at it in battle. At once both absurd and terrifying, the concept of a blimp attacking a mountain seemed ridiculous, until the blimp started releasing energies that dwarfed nature's fury. Even from her place of concealment on top of another mesa a half a mile away, Anjela got the feeling that a flashlight tour of Chernobyl Reactor #4 would be a safer place to be. This was an order of magnitude more intense than anything she'd been involved with before. El Monstroso's menagerie of genetically modified monsters was a petting zoo by comparison.

For this attack, Dr. Mauser had equipped the blimp with four emitter panels and had somehow managed to borrow a singularity-based power supply. The thing could produce enough energy to power a city for a day, but was impossibly expensive to run. And all of that energy was being poured into the top of the mesa. The waves of heat distortion rising from the growing pool of lava looked more like a waterfall in reverse. The invisible beam from the heat ray sparkled as dust and smoke particles and thrown debris entered it, flared into incandescence and exploded into puffs of plasma. She could feel the heat even at this distance, and even in the desert sun.

The plan was simple enough, he was going to melt as much of the top of the mountain as it took until the puddle breached one of the tunnels and flooded Avogadro's complex with molten rock. If that didn't force him out, it would kill him. Troops were stationed in the canyon in case he made a break for it down there, and she was positioned here to snipe at the first opportunity. If Avogadro fired his beam (and it would have to be blindly), attack helicopters were ready to pump missiles into the resulting holes in the mountain.

And then it came, the blindingly bright flash of Avogadro's disintegrator. The beam was visible more as the afterimage it left on the eye. One of the helicopters swooped into position to fire, when there was another flash and the top of the copter ceased to exist. Rotor blades flew out in all directions, and the fuselage dropped to the canyon floor where it crashed and crumpled, without the slightest indication of fire.

"Damn, he's got a fast recharge on that thing," Anjela said.
(snip)

The rest is on DA. There are nasty bits there, so be warned. It's all behind the Mature Content warning, so if you don't have a DA account, you might not be able to read it. The very curious can get this from me by e-mail.

If you can watch Tom Smith's tribute to Jim Henson and not get even a little choked up, you're not a human being.



Unless of course you managed to grow up without the Muppets, then you're just a tragedy.

Check out the video for "Did it Again". The choreography is simply amazing!

Alas, it's Unembedable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR_CkCQ8m70

And the Spanish version is an even hotter edit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieEq_XsM-x0

Only downside, it looks like they were shot in 16:9 but uploaded as 4:3.

Once is a Fluke, Twice is a coincidence.

ELEVEN MORE TIMES and you know, there just might be a trend here.

The link is to a site with eleven more videos of schoolchildren singing the praises of Barack Obama, including several kindergarten classes.

Is it possible to interface the fax modem on my computer with the headphone jack on my cell phone? Now that I've given up my land line, I can't fax (Not that I do all that often).

I know I'd have to manually dial the fax number on the cell, but that's still possible with most fax software too. I'm more interested in getting the signal to go through.

Anyone?

(I expect SnowWolf42 would know....)

I think I'm worse.

It's that time of year again, game tables at Sears. Mostly pool tables, a few air-hockey tables, and a few of those "Flip" tables that combine them both.

Except almost every single one includes a cheezeball ping-pong table surface to put over the thing.

A regulation ping-pong table is 9' long, billiards is about 8', air hockey ranges from about 6' to 4' long.

Look, there's no way you can properly play ping-pong on a 4' long table. (Actually, none of those games really scale well that small). But the most annoying thing is, we have to assemble them completely, which means sticking down this afterthought on top of a beautifully-turned out $800+ pool table. And really, that's NOT the selling point, but the store won't have any place to put this abortion to get it out of the way.

Although I suppose it does serve as a cover to protect the felt, but I think it more than likely guarantees that people will put shit on the table and they'll never end up playing billiards.

DirecTV responded to a complaint I made about the DVR shutting off 4 minutes into the Heroes Season Premiere by giving me 3 months of Showtime free. Nice, but it didn't exactly solve the problem. And because of a billing quirk, it cost me an extra $0.43, weird. Their priorities for software fixes are WAY skewed towards marketing and away from usability and reliability.

NetFlix, on the other hand, noticed that the local distribution center didn't have the second disk of an anime series I was watching, and sent it from another center in addition to the next disk I got from the local center, even though I'm on a One disk at a time plan. That DID solve the problem, and didn't cost me anything to have two disks at once.

(Netflix has another interesting pattern, where if the next disk in a series isn't available, it goes to the next thing in the queue AFTER the series, so that they don't end up sending them to you out of order. The only reason this failed me at one point is that I had Mahoromatic (3 disks) followed by Mahoromatic 2 (Another 3) in my queue, the first time v1.2 wasn't there, I got v2.1, so I now know that you should stick a 1-shot between consecutive series, and knock it back in the queue just before sending back the last volume of season 1.)

Oh, and the next day I caught Heroes on G4.

Ganked from briansiano. Bullet hits at one million frames per second!!



Note how fast the cracks propagate in the tempered glass.

I was wondering if Eric Shwartz was still animating. He is.



Still a total Amiga addict. This bit is about a year old, playing "Still alive". It's fun and really expressive, and a long way from "Amy Walks".

Tomorrow my land line goes away. This is a first for me since college. I've always had a phone line. I've always had a modem. But I've finally realized that between the ClearWire and the TracFone, I only get maybe one call a week on the regular phone, and it's usually just junk. So away with it, and I'll have an extra $27+ a month in my pocket. Which will more than make up for any extra minutes I may need to buy on the TracFone.

I kept it for the longest time because the DirecTV also connects to it, but I've found that it only needs it for making Pay Per View purchases from the remote, and I don't do that.

So, Snip.

Now the only wire running into my house is power.

Although if anyone has any good internet phone stories, that might be interesting to hear.

(It's funny, because I have four phones spread around the house, even though I hardly use them. Kinda like all the vacuum cleaners I have).

Remember this post of mine from February? http://mauser.livejournal.com/355741.html The last line is particularly relevant:

So I'll bet you that if Obama lifts the media ban on filming funeral flights, they will not take advantage of it.

It looks like I "win".

Byron York in the Washington Examiner points out in "Without Bush, media lose interest in war caskets" that Media coverage of war dead arrivals has dropped to a single AP Photographer who happens to live near Dover AFB, who shoots those arrivals the families authorize (the majority of families do) on the off chance that any of their subscribing outlets wants to use them.

Particularly telling is this at the end.

So far this month, 38 American troops have been killed in Afghanistan. For all of 2009, the number is 220 -- more than any other single year and more than died in 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004 combined.

With casualties mounting, the debate over U.S. policy in Afghanistan is sharp and heated. The number of arrivals at Dover is increasing. But the journalists who once clamored to show the true human cost of war are nowhere to be found.

Short form, it was DESIGNED to. But the REALLY interesting thing is finding out who the Designers were. Turns out it didn't come from the Congress, but a Socialist organization called the Apollo Alliance. And if you read This article at Investors Business Daily you'll find some VERY familiar names on the board of directors of that group.

And there's a little about how the bill provides neat little money trapdoors for the groups that make up the alliance.

As the article concludes, "Welcome to government of the activist, by the activist and for the activist."

(Link updated)