What are you gonna do, play with your prick for another 30 years? ... George Carlin
NASA find new lifeform: arsenic microbe widens likelihood of extraterrestrial life - SlashGear
Topic: Science
11:23 am EST, Dec 2, 2010
NASA’s curiously worded press release earlier this week about an event later today prompted speculation that the space agency had discovered extraterrestrial life; going by a leak ahead of conference, it’s actually something about as alien as you can get from physiology as we know it, only on this very planet. According to NOS, NASA has found a new type of bacteria in Mono Lake, California, which lives with levels of arsenic in its biology that were hitherto believed impossible.nullnullnullnullnull
Radley Balko of Reason.com posted this Tampa news channel's cheerful puff piece about a federal check point set up at a Greyhound bus station to pretend to stop terrorists, as well as nab unregistered immigrants, drug dealers, and cash smugglers.
It's not difficult to envision the day where anyone wishing to take mass transportation in this country will have to first submit to a government checkpoint, show ID, and answer questions about any excess cash, prescription medication, or any other items in his possession the government deems suspicious. If and when that happens, freedom of movement will essentially be dead. But it won't happen overnight. It'll happen incrementally. And each increment will, when taken in isolation, appear to some to be perfectly reasonable.
Homeland Security shuts down dozens of Web sites without court order | Raw Story
Topic: Miscellaneous
1:37 am EST, Nov 28, 2010
The Homeland Security Department's customs enforcement division has gone on a Web site shutdown spree, closing down at least 76 domains this week, according to online reports....
Earlier this week, Homeland Security shut down a popular hip-hop music site, RapGodfathers.com, which had nearly 150,000 members. The site claims it is compliant with copyright laws, as it doesn't host copyrighted materials. However, its users posted links to file-hosting services such as Rapidshare and Megaupload, where copyrighted material may have been shared.
What’s most disturbing in the case of OnSmash and RapGodfathers is that both sites claim to have complied with any DMCA removal requests. In the case of OnSmash specifically, the labels themselves gave the site the song links which OS provided to the public.
WASHINGTON—Government agents hired to drive nuclear weapons and components in trucks sometimes got drunk on the job, including an incident last year when two agents were detained by police at a local bar during a convoy mission, according to a report Monday by the U.S. Energy Department's watchdog.
The department's assistant inspector general, Sandra D. Bruce, said her office reviewed 16 alcohol-related incidents involving agents, candidate-agents and others from the government's Office of Secure Transportation between 2007 through 2009. There are nearly 600 federal agents who ship nuclear weapons, weapon components and special nuclear material across the U.S.
The report said two incidents in particular raised red flags because they happened during "secure transportation missions,'' with agents checked into local hotels and vehicles in "safe harbor," or secure conditions.
One of those occurred in 2007, when an agent was arrested for public intoxication; the other happened last year, when police handcuffed and temporarily detained two agents after an incident at a local bar.
UN General Assembly Votes To Allow Gays To Be Executed Without Cause | The New Civil Rights Movement
Topic: Society
4:51 pm EST, Nov 20, 2010
Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people were once again subject to the whims of homophobia and religious and cultural extremism this week, thanks to a United Nations vote that removed “sexual orientation” from a resolution that protects people from arbitrary executions. In other words, the UN General Assembly this week voted to allow LGBT people to be executed without cause.null
USB - Satan's Data Connection | Science | guardian.co.uk
Topic: Society
1:52 am EST, Nov 19, 2010
Evangelical Christians in Brazil have apparently banned the use of USB connections after claiming the technology is the mark of Satan-worshippers (Hat tip: Fernando Frias). Apparently the revelation came after the evangelists noticed that the USB symbol resembles a trident. Presumably they're not great fans of Britain's ballistic missiles either.
China's 'State Capitalism' Sparks a Global Backlash
Topic: Society
11:47 pm EST, Nov 15, 2010
"The Chinese have shown that if they have the ability to kill your model and take your profits, they will," says Ian Bremmer, president of New York-based consultancy Eurasia Group. His book, "The End of the Free Market," argues that a rising tide of "state capitalism" led by China threatens to erode the competitive edge of the U.S
You can see clearly that the delivery volume fell slightly, economists would probably point to the decline in consumption during the economic crisis. The graph shows, however, something disturbing: the promotion will no longer appear slightly above the level of 2003-2007, but soon fall even steep. Only when "undeveloped fields are already taking a job right now, we can roughly hold today, slightly depressed levels stable - until only about 2015. Then need to be added "not yet found boxes. Otherwise we have about a generation later, perhaps only half of current production. nullnullnull
This rant takes a few weak swings but there are also many damning blows.
The bigger issue is whether the country can afford the systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, whether poor, middle class or even rich...
Inequality is instead the result of specific policies, including tax policies, championed by Washington Democrats and Republicans alike as they conducted a bidding war for high-rolling donors in election after election....
Those in the higher reaches aren’t investing in creating new jobs even now, when the full Bush tax cuts remain in effect, so why would extending them change that equation?
Debt Commissioners: Baby Boomers Will Crush Social Security, Medicare - FoxNews.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
10:14 am EST, Nov 15, 2010
The idea that baby boomers weren't paying enough taxes to cover their social security benefits has been well understood for 20 years or more. Nothing has been done about it yet. Now, of course, it is too late to ask them to pay their share because they are too old to pay and too close to retirement to adjust to changes in their plans. Now that we're close enough to seal the deal for the boomers, we're going to "fix" the problem by cutting benefits for the next generation.
Folks at 25 or 30 years old today aren't going to get Social Security at 65 or 67.
They are also going to cut the mortgage interest deduction, pouring gasoline on top of the housing market debacle that is crushing the middle class, and they are going to cut income taxes for the super wealthy.
After not doing anything at all about the civil liberties issues that prompted many young people to vote for him, Obama is going to turn around fuck our economic future. Go team Obama!
You are getting fucked because you are not a large enough demographic group to matter politically.
