Tag: god bless the land of the free

This man is my personal hero

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The truly lazy are often the most creative. Like this developer, who was caught outsourcing his entire job to China so that he could spend his time at work… not working.

The ruse—highlighted in a Verizon case study—was carried out by an employee called “Bob” who worked at an anonymous “critical infrastructure company”. The trick was only spotted when someone noticed suspicious activity on the company’s VPN log. The report explains:

“We received a request from a US-based company asking for our help in understanding some anomalous activity that they were witnessing in their VPN logs. Plainly stated, the VPN logs showed [Bob] logged in from China, yet the employee is right there, sitting at his desk, staring into his monitor.”

While Bob apparently received glowing performance reviews, all of his development work was being carried out from China. In fact, he pulled off the same scam across multiple companies concurrently, earning “several hundred thousand dollars a year”.

Further investigation revealed a typical day’s work for Bob included: reading Reddit for two hours, shopping on eBay for an hour, browsing Facebook for two hours, and checking LinkedIn for a further two.

passtheasparagus

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Oh silly republicans, how you make me giggle

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Frist there was this:

And then there was this:

Which made the Aussies laugh because, as one put it:

Australia has universal health care, compulsory voting, no guns, no death penalty, pro-choice when it comes to contraception, openly gay politicians and judges, evolution is taught in all schools and out female PM is an unmarried atheist. Be sure to declare your pitchforks at Tullamarine.

God bless the land of the free!

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Q: Why is America the best country in the world? A: It’s not.

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[Debate Moderator]
I’m gonna hold you to an answer on that. What makes America the greatest country in the world?

[Will]
Well, our Constitution is a masterpiece. James Madison was a genius. The Declaration of Independence is for me the single greatest piece of American writing. … You don’t look satisfied.

[Debate Moderator]
One’s a set of laws and the other is a declaration of war. I want a human moment from you.

[Will]
It’s NOT the greatest country in the world, Professor. That’s my answer.

[Debate Moderator]
You’re saying

[Will]
Yes.

[Debate Moderator]
Let’s talk about

[Will (Speaking to Sharon]
Fine. Sharon, the NEA is a loser. Yeah, it accounts for a penny out of our paycheck, but he gets to hit you with it anytime he wants. It doesn’t cost money. It costs votes. It costs airtime. And column inches. You know why people don’t like liberals? Because they lose. If liberals are so fuckin’ smart then how come they lose so goddamn always?

[Sharon]
Hey

[Will (to Lewis]
And with a straight face, you’re gonna sit there and tell students that America is so star-spangled awesome that we’re the only ones in the world who have freedom? Canada has freedom. Japan has freedom. The U.K. France. Italy. Germany. Spain. Australia. BELGIUM has freedom. (laughs) Two hundred and seven sovereign states in the world, like, a hundred and eighty of them have freedom.

[Debate Moderator]
All right

[Will]
And you, Sorority Girl, just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day, there’s some things you should know. One of them is there’s absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re seventh in literacy. Twenty-seventh in math. Twenty-second in science. Forty-ninth in life expectancy. A hundred and seventy-eighth in infant mortality. Third in median household income. Number four in labor force and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: Number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies.

Now none of this is the fault of a twenty-year-old college student, but you nonetheless are without a doubt a member of the worst, period, generation, period, ever, period. So when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I dunno what the fuck you’re talkin’ about. Yosemite?

…

Sure used to be. We stood up for what was right. We fought for moral reasons. We passed laws, struck down laws, for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed. We cared about our neighbors. We put our money where our mouths were. And we never beat our chest.

We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and we cultivated the world’s greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy. [pause] We reached for the stars. Acted like men.

We aspired to intelligence. We didn’t belittle it—it didn’t make us feel inferior.

We didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn’t, oh, we didn’t scare so easy. Ha. We were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed. By great men. Men who were revered. First step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one. America is not the greatest country in the world anymore. [pause] Enough?

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Oh dear lord….

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Dear Prudence is Slate.com’s agony aunt. She gets all the weirdos.

My husband had sex with me while I was in a drunken state. Should I divorce him?

Dear Prudence,
My husband is kind, supportive, funny, generous, smart, and loving. However, I feel like I must divorce him. Six years ago, when we were in our early 20s and had just fallen in love, after a night of partying and drinking, he woke me up in the middle of the night and started to have sex with me. I was dozing and still drunk and, yes, I took my panties off myself. But when I realized that it was not OK for him to make advances on me in my state, I pushed him away and ran out. He later felt so bad he wanted to turn himself in for rape. I was very confused and thought at times that I was overreacting and at others that I was raped. We painfully worked through this, but the incident made my husband very reluctant about having sex. This led to an agreement that he shouldn’t be afraid of coming close to me in similar situations as long as he asked my consent. This made us feel better and I felt secure again. However, we just found ourselves in a very similar situation. After coming back from a friend’s wine tasting we went to bed and he started to kiss me. I liked it and went along, only to wake up in the morning and remember only half of it. Now I am in the same painful spot I was before and I can’t fathom how he could have ignored our agreement. Should I just drop it or am I right about feeling abused?

—Confused

Dear Confused,
I understand the need for colleges to have unambiguous codes of sexual conduct for their young, horny, possibly plastered students. These often require getting explicit permission for every escalating advance. However, if two adults are in love and have frequently made love then each can assume implicit consent to throw such legalistic caution—as well as panties—to the wind. Certainly spouses are entitled to say, “Not tonight” or “Not there,” and have such a request respected. But even a married couple who have had sex hundreds of times can enjoy that alcohol might ignite a delightful, spontaneous encounter. Your approach, however, seems to be to treat your sex life as if it is subject to regulatory review by the Department of Health and Human Services. Your prim, punctilious, punitive style has me admiring your put-upon husband’s ability to even get it up, given the possibility he’ll be accused of rape—or turn himself in for it!—if one of you fails a breathalyzer test. Living in terror that expressing one’s perfectly normal sexual desire could end one’s marriage, and freedom, is itself a form of abuse. Stop acting like a parody of a gender-studies course catalog and start acting like a loving wife. If you can’t, then give the poor sap a divorce.

—Prudie

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Fairground food, deep-fried and on a stick!

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FARK this morning had a link to the Wisconsin State Fair’s New Food menu. I had to cut out some of the more memorable entries:

Deluxe Deep Fried Bacon Wrapped Cheddar Hot Dog On-a-Stick
Deep Fried Pizza On-a-Stick
Sweet Potato Fries with Marshmallow Dipping Cream
Deep Fried Brownie On-a-Stick
Deep Fried Cookie Dough
Deep Fried Cheesecake
Deep Fried Bacon Wrapped Sweet Potato Tot On-a-Stick
Deep Fried Battered Bacon Chunks with Dipping Sauce
Salt-Sprinkled Chocolate covered Mozarella

Come on, seriously???? Seriously??????

If you don’t believe me, go look for yourselves: http://www.wistatefair.com/wp/index.php/new-foods/. Hell, I’d recommend you go there anyway to go see a website who’s slogan is “Share the Oohs, Aahs, and Moos”.

I kid you not.

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Jesus walked with dinosaurs…

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The debate between creationists and proponents of evolution isn’t ending any time soon, but now some creationists have a secret weapon, “Nessie!” Certain fundamentalist schools in Louisiana plan to teach children that the Loch Ness monster is real in a bid to disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution.

It sounds like a plot dreamed up by the creators of Southpark, but it’s all true: schoolchildren in Louisiana are to be taught that the Loch Ness monster is real in a bid by religious educators to disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution. Thousands of children in the southern state will receive publicly-funded vouchers for the next school year to attend private schools where Scotland’s most famous mythological beast will be taught as a real living creature.

These private schools follow a fundamentalist curriculum including the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) programme to teach controversial religious beliefs aimed at disproving evolution and proving creationism. One tenet has it that if it can be proved that dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time as man then Darwinism is fatally flawed.

The textbooks in the series are alleged to teach young earth creationism; are hostile towards other religions and other sectors of Christianity, including Roman Catholicism; and present a biased version of history that is often factually incorrect. One ACE textbook – Biology 1099, Accelerated Christian Education Inc – reads: “Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the ‘Loch Ness Monster’ in Scotland? ‘Nessie’ for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.”

Another claim taught is that a Japanese whaling boat once caught a dinosaur. It’s unclear if the movie Godzilla was the inspiration for this lesson.

Private religious schools, including the Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, Louisiana, which follows the ACE curriculum, have already been cleared to receive the state voucher money transferred from public school funding, thanks to a bill pushed through by state Governor Bobby Jindal.

Boston-based researcher and writer Bruce Wilson, who specialises in the American political religious right, compares the curriculum to Islamic fundamentalist teaching. “They are being brought up to believe that they’re at war with secular society. The only valid government would be a Christian fundamentalist government. Obviously some comparisons could be made to Islamic Fundamentalists in schools. One of these texts from Bob Jones University Press claims that dinosaurs were fire-breathing dragons. It has little to do with science as we currently understand. It’s more like medieval scholasticism.”

Of course, the Scottish tourist industry might well reap a dividend from the craziness of the American education system. Nessie expert Tony Drummond, who leads tours as part of Cruise Loch Ness, has a few words of advice to the US schools in question: come to the loch and try to find the monster.

Textbooks of some state-funded Christian schools praise the Ku Klux Klan. The violent, racist organisation, which still exists in the US, advocates white supremacy, white nationalism and anti-immigration. One excerpt from Bob Jones University Press American history textbook has been reported as saying: “the [Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross … In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians.”

It isn’t just America where the bizarre Christian Nessie myth is being taught as a reality. The UK has similar religious schools but they do not receive cash from the state. Nevertheless, the Evangelical Christian curriculum they follow has been approved by UK Government agency, the National Recognition Information Centre (Naric) which guides universities and employers on the validity of different qualifications. Naric judged the International Certificate of Christian Education (ICCE) as officially comparable to qualifications offered by the Cambridge International exam board. It is estimated around 2000 pupils study at more than 50 private Christian schools in Britain for the certificates as well as several home-educated students.

Huh… I didn’t know that last part. Just goes to show that crazy is a universal concept.

Source: The Scotland Herald

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The conservatives are leading Canada down a path that I don’t like

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I’ve been reading the news on the CBC and on La Presse regarding the new tough crime omnibus bill that Harper’s Tories have rammed through the commons and I don’t like the way things are going for Canada. Having a bit of outside perspective, I’m seeing that Canada really is becoming the 51st state and I really don’t like it.

Prisons-for-profit are commonplace in the US, with the “land of the free” having the highest incarceration rates and prison terms in the world. Seriously. Numbers from 2008 show that approximately one in every 31 adults in the US was behind bars, or being monitored (probation and parole). The prison population has quadrupled since the 1980s, partially as a result of mandatory sentencing that came about during the “war on drugs.”

What’s really scary is that, both in the US and now in Canada, the people behind these tough new crime and immigration laws aren’t in it for the safety of the man on the street. They’re in it for the money. The lobby groups funding these bills and pushing them forward are basically the mouthpieces for privately run incarceration corporations, who want a bigger share of a billion-dollar industry. For these companies to do well, people have to go to prison. For this to happen, new policies need to be enacted, policies that serve them: harsher prison sentences and greater reliance on incarceration than on probation and parole.

I wholeheartedly agree with Bob Rae (scary!): “It makes no sense for the government to be going in this direction. It’s not a real crime prevention strategy, it’s a prison promotion strategy, it’s an incarceration strategy, that I think will prove to be a very costly mistake for Canada,” said Rae.

From the CBC:

The toughening of jail sentences and the introduction of new mandatory minimum sentences for certain drug and other offences are among the measures opposed by critics. Louise Arbour, former justice at the Supreme Court of Canada, is one of those critics and a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, a group that studies and makes recommendations on national drug policies around the world. She told CBC News on Monday that mandatory minimum sentences are generally “bad criminal law policies.”

They preclude judges from considering the specific circumstances of the offender and the offence and tie their hands, Arbour said. With marijuana-related offences, mandatory minimum sentences “go completely against the modern thinking by world leaders about the direction that the so-called war on drugs should take after 40 years of failure,” she said.

The government says it is targeting drug traffickers, but Arbour says mandatory minimum sentences won’t put a dent in what is a global problem. In her opinion, the safe streets and communities act is “a very costly enterprise that is based on ideology rather than science and progressive experimental initiatives that Canada is very famous for,” Arbour said.

So yeah… Mandatory sentencing, strongarm political tactics, dodgy election practices. Welcome to the Land of the Free Up North, Eh?

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Reason #425,896 why I don’t want to go to the US anymore

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In a case against a New York website owner, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is claiming that merely linking to copyrighted material is a crime. DHS, along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), seized Brian McCarthy’s domain, channelsurfing.net, in late January. The site has now been replaced with a government warning: “This domain has been seized by ICE – Homeland Security Investigations, Special Agent in Charge, New York Office. It is unlawful to reproduce copyrighted material, such as movies, music, software or games, without authorization… First-time offenders convicted of a criminal felony copyright law will face up to five years in federal prison, restitution, forfeiture and fine.”

[…]

The advocacy group Demand Progress has claimed that McCarthy never reproduced copyrighted material, and that his website simply linked to other sites. While the criminal complaint alleges that McCarthy did engage in the “reproduction and distribution” of copyrighted material, it is never clear that he actually reproduced any of the specified broadcasts.

“Under that sort of thinking, everyone who’s sent around a link to a copyrighted YouTube video is a criminal,” Demand Progress warned, calling the prosecution a “radical shift” in the way the government polices the Internet.

Seriously, shit like this makes me scared. If only to avoid the potentiality of trouble, I’m temped to relocate my website away from US soil. I wonder if Sealand is still running a web host…

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