SAN DIEGO (Wireless Flash) — They say nice guys finish last when it comes to dating, so a new educational class is trying to teach these fellas how to be bad — real bad. The class is called “Badboy Lifestyle: Learn How to Seduce Any Woman Out There” and it's being offered in Europe as well as the U.S.

The three-day workshop costs around $1000 and teaches guys with no game how to become “playaz” by using persuasive lady-catching and keeping tactics. These strategies include things such as how to be “bad” — or freaky — in bed and instructing the goody two-shoes on how to handle multiple relationships at the same time.

Class instructor Robert Tharp says the average bad boy student is in his mid-20s and has minimal sexual experience, but he insists they generally aren't ugly, just very insecure when dealing with women. The proof is in the pudding. Tharp claims the class so far has gotten 70 percent of its participants laid.

Had lunch with the gang at seqbio today. It was an entertaining hour, to say the least. Spent the whole time talking about the philosophy of consciousness, and other such mental masturbatory topics.

On my way to run an errand – i.e. pick up a shiny pretty thing for Katy – I walked next to those god-awful publicity trucks you sometimes see blocking traffic downtown. This one was the best one yet : an ad for travel to mexico. Imagine if you will a glass-enclosed flatbed truck, filled with about a foot of sand, beach chairs with umbrellas… and two bikini-clad women lounging around, looking bored out of their skull.

Now first of all, that's tawdry and tacky, but I'm also wondering about the legality of having people riding in the back of a sand-filled truck, if only safety-wise. But really though, if you want to entice me to go to mexico, using stoned out women is not the way to go.

http://pulse.ebay.com/

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/11/16/life.hunting.reut/index.html

HOUSTON, Texas (Reuters) — Hunters soon may be able to sit at their computers and blast away at animals on a Texas ranch via the Internet, a prospect that has state wildlife officials up in arms.

The Web site already offers target practice with a .22 caliber rifle and could soon let hunters shoot at deer, antelope and wild pigs, site creator John Underwood said on Tuesday. Texas officials are not quite sure what to make of Underwood's Web site, but may tweak existing laws to make sure Internet hunting does not get out of hand.

“This is the first one I've seen,” said Texas Parks and Wildlife Department wildlife director Mike Berger. “The current state statutes don't cover this sort of thing.” Underwood, an estimator for a San Antonio, Texas auto body shop, has invested $10,000 to build a platform for a rifle and camera that can be remotely aimed on his 330-acre (133-hectare) southwest Texas ranch by anyone on the Internet anywhere in the world.

The idea came last year while viewing another Web site on which cameras posted in the wild are used to snap photos of animals. “We were looking at a beautiful white-tail buck and my friend said 'If you just had a gun for that.' A little light bulb went off in my head,” he said.

Internet hunting could be popular with disabled hunters unable to get out in the woods or distant hunters who cannot afford a trip to Texas, Underwood said. Berger said state law only covers “regulated animals” such as native deer and birds and cannot prevent Underwood from offering Internet hunts of “unregulated” animals such as non-native deer that many ranchers have imported and wild pigs.

He has proposed a rule that will come up for public discussion in January that anyone hunting animals covered by state law must be physically on site when they shoot. Berger expressed reservations about remote control hunting, but noted that humans have always adopted new technologies to hunt.

“First it was rocks and clubs, then we sharpened it and put it on a stick. Then there was the bow and arrow, black powder, smokeless power and optics,” Berger said. “Maybe this is the next technological step out there.”

Underwood, 39, said he will offer animal hunting as soon as he gets a fast Internet connection to his remote ranch that will enable hunters to aim the rifle quickly at passing animals. He said an attendant would retrieve shot animals for the shooters, who could have the heads preserved by a taxidermist. They could also have the meat processed and shipped home, or donated to animal orphanages.

Am I the only one to see the potential for Darwin awards for the doofuses hired to go pick up the animals?

I learned at 12:54 that my 1pm conference call was rescheduled for friday. Until then, I kinda have SFA to do.

Anybody have some good smut I could read at the office?

I finally updated my comics page with new strips.

Go have a look here.

When U.S. President George W. Bush arrives in Ottawa probably later this year should he be welcomed? Or should he be charged with war crimes?

It's an interesting question. On the face of it, Bush seems a perfect candidate for prosecution under Canada's Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Act.

This act was passed in 2000 to bring Canada's ineffectual laws in line with the rules of the new International Criminal Court. While never tested, it lays out sweeping categories under which a foreign leader like Bush could face arrest.

In particular, it holds that anyone who commits a war crime, even outside Canada, may be prosecuted by our courts. What is a war crime? According to the statute, it is any conduct defined as such by “customary international law” or by conventions that Canada has adopted.

War crimes also specifically include any breach of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, such as torture, degradation, wilfully depriving prisoners of war of their rights “to a fair and regular trial,” launching attacks “in the knowledge that such attacks will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians” and deportation of persons from an area under occupation.

Outside of one well-publicized (and quickly squelched) attempt in Belgium, no one has tried to formally indict Bush. But both Oxfam International and the U.S. group Human Rights Watch have warned that some of the actions undertaken by the U.S. and its allies, particularly in Iraq, may fall under the war crime rubric.

The case for the prosecution looks quite promising. First, there is the fact of the Iraq war itself. After 1945, Allied tribunals in Nuremberg and Tokyo in an astonishing precedent ruled that states no longer had the unfettered right to invade other countries and that leaders who started such conflicts could be tried for waging illegal war.

Concurrently, the new United Nations outlawed all aggressive wars except those authorized by its Security Council.

Today, a strong case could be made that Bush violated the Nuremberg principles by invading Iraq. Indeed, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has already labelled that war illegal in terms of the U.N. Charter.

Second, there is the manner in which the U.S. conducted this war.

The mistreatment of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison is a clear contravention of the Geneva Accord. The U.S. is also deporting selected prisoners to camps outside of Iraq (another contravention). U.S. press reports also talk of shadowy prisons in Jordan run by the CIA, where suspects are routinely tortured. And the estimated civilian death toll of 100,000 may well contravene the Geneva Accords prohibition against the use of excessive force.

Canada's war crimes law specifically permits prosecution not only of those who carry out such crimes but of the military and political superiors who allow them to happen.

What has emerged since Abu Ghraib shows that officials at the highest levels of the Bush administration permitted and even encouraged the use of torture.

Given that Bush, as he likes to remind everyone, is the U.S. military's commander-in-chief, it is hard to argue he bears no responsibility.

Then there is Guantanamo Bay. The U.S. says detainees there do not fall under the Geneva accords. That's an old argument.

In 1946, Japanese defendants explained their mistreatment of prisoners of war by noting that their country had never signed any of the Geneva Conventions. The Japanese were convicted anyway.

Oddly enough, Canada may be one of the few places where someone like Bush could be brought to justice. Impeachment in the U.S. is most unlikely. And, at Bush's insistence, the new international criminal court has no jurisdiction over any American.

But a Canadian war crimes charge, too, would face many hurdles. Bush was furious last year when Belgians launched a war crimes suit in their country against him so furious that Belgium not only backed down under U.S. threats but changed its law to prevent further recurrences.

As well, according to a foreign affairs spokesperson, visiting heads of state are immune from prosecution when in Canada on official business. If Ottawa wanted to act, it would have to wait until Bush was out of office or hope to catch him when he comes up here to fish.

And, of course, Canada's government would have to want to act. War crimes prosecutions are political decisions that must be authorized by the federal attorney-general.

Still, Prime Minister Paul Martin has staked out his strong opposition to war crimes. This was his focus in a September address to the U.N. General Assembly.

There, Martin was talking specifically about war crimes committed by militiamen in far-off Sudan. But as my friends on the Star's editorial board noted in one of their strong defences of concerted international action against war crimes, the rule must be, “One law for all.”

Original link here: here

http://www.livejournal.com/~talisker/122925.html?nc=17

i was randomly sifting through, and i saw your user name, which happens to be a type of whiskey, so i was intrigued!! read your user info, read your journal, saw boris, fell in love and added you. so it's all boris' fault! i'm a sucker for animals! its nice to meet you to :)! and maybe i can be your first british person :) hope to talk more soon

I loves you Katy

blergh.

Here I was, minding my own business, having lunch composed of all good stuff I've eaten tons before, when I feel all the annoying sighs of an allergic reaction. Not a big one, only itchy lips that are a bit red at the corners of my mouth, but still, it's a pain in the ass. Cause I start to worry about it, and that only serves to make it worse. Took some benadryl, my trusty companion, but still, fuuuuuuck. It's either the dijon mustard or the red pepper. Considering I've had that mustard before, in droves, it might be something as annoying as some sort of pesticide on the pepper cause I might not have washed it enough. Bleh. Still, it's always fun to play the worry game.

I'm perfectly fine now, itchiness and redness all gone, but the worry remains.

I hate my body.