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That some of Clinton’s supporters would think that trying to link Obama to drugs, murder & gay sex is an argument for Clinton’s electibility is ___________.
sigh
Someone come get me when it’s all over…
Posted by protected static as asshattery, politics at 2:11 PM UTC
Oh, wait… My bad. It’s just bacon…
Bacon… in a can! duhn-duhn-duhn-DUHN!!!! /movie_guy
Propriety demands that I thank John Scalzi for the link, but I’m going to send him my therapy bills instead.
Posted by protected static as random at 5:52 PM UTC
This morning, I read an interesting article (just before it succumbed to slashdotting) called ‘13 reasons why Ruby, Python and the gang will push Java to die… of old age.’ Nothing earth-shattering in it, but one of the author’s points was that successful languages tend to be backed by large companies – to which someone commented:
C++ wasn’t sponsored by any big company.
Really? AT&T doesn’t count as a big company? ‘Ma Bell’? Bell Labs? Maybe not so much now, but man – back in the day…
Alas, my attempt at delivering snark to target was stymied by this:
Maximum concurrency limit of 10 exceeded.Currently serving the following requests:
/2008/05/28/13-reasons-java-die-old-age/
/2008/05/28/13-reasons-java-die-old-age/
/2008/05/28/13-reasons-java-die-old-age/
/favicon.ico
/2008/05/28/13-reasons-java-die-old-age/
/2008/05/28/13-reasons-java-die-old-age/
/2008/05/28/13-reasons-java-die-old-age/
/2008/05/28/13-reasons-java-die-old-age/
/2008/05/28/13-reasons-java-die-old-age/
/2008/05/28/13-reasons-java-die-old-age/
/2008/05/15/13-reasons-for-umls-descent-into-darkness/
/2008/05/28/13-reasons-java-die-old-age/
/2008/05/28/13-reasons-java-die-old-age/
If you are the owner of this website, you may need to upgrade to a more advanced plan.
(A max of 10 concurrent requests? yeesh… I’m surprised I was even able to read the posting.) Anyway, I’m sure that by now someone has managed to get through and point this out. And if no one has, well… there’s always tomorrow – or six hours from now when the slashdotting hordes have moved on to their next… wait… sorry… what’s that?
Ooooh, shiny.
*ahem* Where were we? Oh yeah: You call that music? Turn that noise off! Now get off my lawn, before I call the police!
Posted by protected static as geek, programming at 5:33 PM UTC
Are they even using that slogan any more? At any rate, I went to check my primary webmail about 15 minutes ago, and was greeted by this:
(click for full size)
As of now, it’s fixed, sorta… The ‘under construction’ image is still bleeding through a background image in various regions of my webmail’s UI.
Whoops.
[edited to add: as of 10:47PM PDT, it's back! Boy, I wouldn't want to be a Comcast support grunt tonight...]
[edited to add: as of 29 May 2008 4:50PM PDT, it's looking like they were the victims of a DNS hijacking. From TFA:
"We are doing all kinds of forensic analysis of the records to see what exactly happened," said Charlie Douglas, a Comcast spokesman. "Somebody logged into the account at Network Solutions and made alterations to our settings and account information and redirected Comcast.net to another site. Whoever did it was not authorized to do that."
I'll bet they weren't.]
Posted by protected static as geek at 10:45 PM UTC
This was The Boy’s (fairly indignant) description of how Small Dog* plays fetch.
He mocks me… Heh.
*Ever play fetch with a Rat Terrier? Mock isn’t quite the right word, but it’ll do.
(We currently have 3 dogs: Big Dog (a gracefully-aging Black Lab/Pit Bull cross), Small Dog, and Little Dog Z. The latter 2 are American Hairless Terriers – think standard Rat Terriers, minus the hair. Z is a recent addition to our household, and is still a puppy. Even as a puppy, he’s about 50% larger than Small Dog, so he really fscked up the (nick-)naming convention…)
Posted by protected static as random at 9:27 PM UTC
I never thought this would come to pass, yet here we are… I feel compelled to speak up in Hillary Clinton’s defense.
Let’s get a number of things clear: I hate the Clintons. I’ve hated them pretty much ever since the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” fiasco, and I’ve seen little in the intervening 16 years to do all that much to change my opinion of them. I’m a cautiously pessimistic supporter of Obama; I much preferred the way Edwards talked about issues of class, but hey – when the press massacres your preferred candidate early on, you adjust; you move on.
Still… I’ve been reading a lot of blogospheric bullshit lately about how sexism hasn’t played a role in shutting down Clinton’s campaign. And I gotta say – it’s pretty high-grade bullshit; but it’s still bullshit.
So – this bullshit – is it stupidity? Or willful ignorance? Or deliberate shit-stirring? Not that the three categories are mutually exclusive, of course…
Senator Clinton has been part of the national political scene since, well, Bill Clinton’s presidency. Since that time, Clinton’s name has been attached to insinuations of lesbianism; she’s been labeled a FemiNazi; she’s weathered a lot of attacks that use sexist language, imagery, and dogwhistles – and now, 15+ years later, she has extremely high negative ratings and an apparent ceiling of national support that has a hard time breaking out of the low 40s.
You can’t tell me that almost two decades of scurrilous attacks and insinuations haven’t had anything to do with that. The invective personally directed against her by Rush, North, Liddy, et. al., has been in remission since she seemed content to remain the junior Senator from NY – but once she declared her candidacy, that bile came spewing back out.
So, once and for all: to say that sexism played no role in hindering Clinton’s quest for the Democratic nomination is, well, foolish or ignorant. To say that this sexism was actively cultivated by the Obama campaign also strikes me as foolish or ignorant. It sets aside Clinton’s history, the very thing she’s promoting as an asset, and pretends that no one could possibly look at her and her qualifications and think, ‘you know… maybe we could do better.’ But to say that sexism played no role whatsoever in ending her campaign also misses an opportunity for us to do better.
I happen to believe that we can do better.
Posted by protected static as politics at 12:16 AM UTC
‘Exhibit A’ being, yet again, bin Laden’s own words:
CAIRO, Egypt — Osama bin Laden released a new message on Sunday denouncing Arab leaders for sacrificing the Palestinians and saying the head of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah did not really have the strength to take on Israel.
In his second audio message in three days focusing on the Palestinians, the al-Qaida leader said the only way to liberate Palestine is to fight the Arab regimes that are protecting Israel. And he called on Muslim militants in Egypt to help break the blockade of Gaza.
Bin Laden said Muslims should ignore the Islamic prohibition against raising arms against fellow Muslims, claiming it was legitimate to rise up against leaders who are not governing according to Islamic law. Those leaders, he said, came to power “either by a military coup or with backing from foreign forces.”
“Those (Arab) kings and leaders sacrificed Palestine and Al-Aqsa to keep their crowns,” bin Laden said, referring to Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest sites. “But we will not be relieved of this responsibility.”
Got that? This is one radical sectarian faction (Sunni al-Qaida) trying to achieve strategic advantage over another radical sectarian faction (Shiite Hezbollah) as well as over vastly larger, more moderate entities – Jordan, Egypt, and, to a lesser degree, the Saudis.
Talking in broad sweeping statements about clashes of civilization makes a very similar mistake as was made during the Cold War – treating anything that smacks of a particular ideology (or in this case, a religion) as a monolithic enemy. In the Cold War, anything even vaguely associated with Communism was seen as Out To Destroy Mom, The Flag, And Apple Pie. This approach was simple-minded and counterproductive then; it is equally as simple-minded and counterproductive now.
If our enemy is Islam, who winds up in that category: Brunei? Stupid. Indonesia? Stupid. Jordan? Stupid. Turkey? Stupid. Albania? Stupid. Bahrain? Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. There are far more moderate Muslims out there than militant; declaring war on them all only creates adversaries from people who otherwise would be glad to be our global neighbors and partners.
Posted by protected static as politics at 5:24 PM UTC
Just a ‘heads up’ about a commenter named ‘Jamie Holts’ who has been leaving a lot of innocuous comments on political blogs over the last 24 hours – ‘Jamie’ is a spammer. His ‘blog’ is bestnewspolitics.com, which appears to consist solely of content stolen from ezinearticles.com; his ‘blogroll’ consists of links to bulk emailing software, keylogger software, splog generation software, gambling sites and get-rich-quick sites.
‘Jamie’ is building up his site’s Google juice by leaving innocuous, link-free comments that will easily get past most comment spam traps; if you use a spam-fighting service like Askimet and get a comment from someone linking back to bestnewspolitics.com, please flag the comment as spam before you delete it.
Jamie Holts is a spammer; bestnewspolitics.com is a splog. Pass it on… :-)
Posted by protected static as asshattery, blogging, spam at 5:19 PM UTC
So there I am, driving down the road, munching on a total impulse purchase of Japanese rice crackers, minding my own business, when all of a sudden an ill-chosen handful of crackers teaches me a most valuable lesson: when those wacky Japanese a.) make rice crackers that look like grilled squid and b.) put a big old cartoony fish on the package, guess what? They aren’t being cute – the crackers really are made with fish.
Puts a whole new spin on goldfish crackers, doesn’t it?
(If I’d been paying closer attention, I would have noticed that the package not only bore the mark of the Grinning-Madly-Because-I-Make-Gaijin-Vomit fish, but a shrimp and a squid as well. The shrimp looked about as realistic as anything printed on Japanese snack food packaging can look; the squid, on the other hand, had Hello Kitty eyes and was waving a fan. I’m pretty sure that the Sanrio squid would have been all the Hell No! warning I needed had I noticed it in time. Oh well. Live and learn.)
Posted by protected static as random at 11:19 PM UTC