Good for you, Lynndie England, you chinless, inbred, runty, androgynous backwoods mutt! When you mimed a crotch-shot at that hooded detainee, you reminded us all of what Imperial service should be like: one long S&M tour of the tropics, where every man, woman and child of the conquered peoples exists solely as an object for your pleasure.
The Greeks and Romans were honest about conquest. They divided the task into two parts: first you vanquish the enemy on the battlefield, and then you rape every single man, woman and child among the conquered. They were just as systematic about this phase of the operation as the campaign that preceded it. The troops may have been weary, but somehow they found the devotion to duty to impress their tribal superiority on their defeated enemies in the most direct, practical sense: by fucking them in the ass.
Among the nations conquered and buggered by Roman civilization was Britain. They, too, knew in their colons exactly what it was to be colonized. As the inhabitants were being rogered, they learned a valuable lesson, which they passed on to their distant descendents, the founders of the British Empire: being the soldier of a victorious empire means having a free pass to a giant rape-camp thousands of miles across, crammed with submissive, trembling victims of every age and shape. And every damn one of them is yours, to do with as you please.
putting the colon back in colonization
prisons
"America's inmate population grew by 2.9 percent last year, to almost 2.1 million people, with one of every 75 men living in prison or jail."
"The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the Corrections Officer says, 'I love to make a grown man piss on himself.'"
more election fun
A few days ago I watched this documentary; it made me angry all over again. (It's showing on Sundance.) It went into a lot more detail about the egregious abuses than I remember having heard at the time. From the news coverage I remembered, it sounded like the main issue was poorly-designed voting machine interfaces (which, you would assume, would affect both parties equally.) But the most amazing things was how they deleted "former felons" from the voting roles: the database company they hired to do this was instructed that when matching names, they should:
- match the last name;
- only match the first five letters of the first name;
- not match middle initials, "jr.", etc.;
- match date-of-birth "approximately".
When they balked about how many false positives that would cause, the gov't told them "we want to cast as wide a net as possible." Apparently the few hand-checks that were done showed that the purges were around 5% accurate!
The claim goes that because they were matching last names only, they excluded a disproportionate number of black voters (who generally vote something like 90% democratic in Florida.)
Election Boards Use Intimidation and Outright Lying to Stop Students from Voting
Federal and state courts have clearly established that students have the right to vote where they go to school, even if they live in a dorm. But interviews with college students, civil-rights attorneys, political strategists and legal experts reveal that election officials all over the country are erecting illegal barriers to keep young voters from casting ballots.
Bush defends dropping absentee-ballot witnesses
(just make up anything for the registration, they don't confirm email)
On Tuesday, Gov. Jeb Bush signed into a law a measure that will forever drop the witness requirement from absentee ballots. Starting this July, absentee ballots will only need the signature of the voter in order to be considered valid. With the witness requirement dropped, Florida will essentially be offering voting by mail.
And there are signs of another Florida election scandal brewing involving absentee ballots: The Florida Department of Law Enforcement this week has opened an investigation into a March city election in Orlando. FDLE agents have seized absentee ballots in the case and are looking at whether or not election fraud was committed.
When asked about the investigation, Gov. Bush on Wednesday continued to defend the new law, noting that election supervisors have told him they didn't verify the names of witnesses anyway, only the names of the voters.
exterminate all rational garfield
auto-domestication
"We always tend to think that humans have just had a continuous surge in brain size over the last two million years, but actually over the last thirty thousand years brain size has decreased by 10 to 15 percent. [...] This gracility is exactly the same pattern we see in the evolution of dogs from wolves, or bonobos from chimpanzees, or domesticated foxes from wild foxes. In all these cases an increasing gracility of the bone is an incidental effect.
I think that we have to start thinking about the idea that humans in the last 30, 40, or 50 thousand years have been domesticating ourselves. If we're following the bonobo or dog pattern, we're moving toward a form of ourselves with more and more juvenile behavior. [...] I think that current evidence is that we're in the middle of an evolutionary event in which tooth size is falling, jaw size is falling, brain size is falling, and it's quite reasonable to imagine that we're continuing to tame ourselves."
putting the SOY back in SOYLENT GREEN!
"The Chinese government has shown an unusually high level of concern as a result of a bold media exposure towards a scandal in which human hair was used to make soy sauce.
China Central Television first raised public worries over the quality of domestic soy sauce by uncovering a substandard workshop in central China's Hubei Province, where piles of waste human hair were found. The hairs were treated in special containers to distill amino acid, the most common substance contained in soybean sauce.
Human hair is rich in protein content, just like soybean, wheat and bran, the conventional and legally accepted raw ingredients for the production of soy sauce.
By producing soy sauce from such raw materials, the producers were said able to cut costs by half. Workers employed at the plants, however, never bought soy sauce marked as "blended" on the packaging, because that usually meant that human hair was the basic material in the sauce."
DNA Lounge: Wherein I ramble about my new camera.
Photos are up of tonight's King's X / Doppler Inc show. I took them this time, and they came out quite a bit better than my photos usually do, because today I finally broke down and got a new digital camera. I replaced the Nikon Coolpix 990 that I'd been using for almost four years with a Canon EOS 10D (the same camera that Angela uses) and a Canon EF 24mm f1.4L USM lens. It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up. It's almost like my previous camera wasn't even a camera: the 10D blows it away on so many levels. Focus is fast, it can take 3 shots a second for a total of 9 before stalling on the card, and I can shoot in normal club lighting at 1/60 or faster with no flash! I'm very impressed. Its only drawback is that it's a real camera with a real lens, which means it's big and heavy and doesn't fit in my pocket. But, that's still the only choice if you want "not junk." DNA Lounge: Wherein we once again feel the love for Great Satan ClearChannel.
Well, ClearChannel is going to put a stop to that, by golly! In case there was any doubt that ClearChannel is the Great Satan, check this out: Clear Channel Limits Live CDs: Company to block bands from selling instant albums.
The recording-and-burning company DiscLive estimated on April 12th that it would gross $500,000 selling live discs this spring alone. But in a move expected to severely limit the industry, Clear Channel Entertainment has bought the patent from the technology's inventors and now claims to own the exclusive right to sell concert CDs after shows. The company, which is the biggest concert promoter in the world, says the patent covers its 130 venues along with every other venue in the country."We want to be artist-friendly," says Steve Simon, a Clear Channel executive vice president and the director of Instant Live. "But it is a business, and it's not going to be 'we have the patent, now everybody can use it for free.'"
"It's one more step toward massive control and consolidation of Clear Channel's corporate agenda," says String Cheese Incident manager Mike Luba, who feuded with Clear Channel last year after promoters blocked the band from using CD-burning equipment.
The Pixies, who are booking a fall reunion tour with several probable Clear Channel venues, say Clear Channel has already told them DiscLive can't burn and sell CDs on-site. "Presuming Clear Channel's service and product are of equal quality, it may be best to feed the dragon rather than draw swords," says Pixies manager Ken Goes. "Still, I'm not fond of doing business with my arm twisted behind my back."
Apparently the patent in question is US Patent 6,614,729, issued September 2, 2003. It is, as you would presumably expect, bullshit. From what I can tell, what the so-called "inventors" have patented is this process:
- Record audio digitally;
- Manually divide the stream into "tracks" as it is coming in;
- When finished, send the tracks to multiple CD burners.
The United States Patent Office has found this "invention" to be so novel that is has granted a twenty year monopoly to the "inventors." This means that ClearChannel will get to decide who, if anybody, can make on-the-spot recordings of any concert until 2023.
Fuckles the Clown
Spanky the clown arrested on porn charges: Spanky, a clown with the renowned Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, has been arrested on charges stemming from a child pornography investigation, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that when agents searched Riccio's computer, they discovered "thousands of images, many of which involve prepubescent children engaged in various sexual and lewd acts."
