High Handed Hypocrisy

Gingrich would like to remind everybody that that marriage is between one man and one woman whom you abandon riddled with cancer on her hospital bed while you fuck the shit out of your mistress whom you later marry and cheat on with a third woman while screaming with Godly moral outrage about the infidelities of the president.

From http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2011/02/thrice-married-serial-adulterer-obama.html

Hold whatever view you want.
Then live by it.
But do not use the power of government to enforce your views upon others.

jeesh

Has Anyone Else Read Crichton's "Terminal Man?"

Trying brain pacemakers to zap psychiatric disease

WASHINGTON – Call them brain pacemakers, tiny implants that hold promise for fighting tough psychiatric diseases — if scientists can figure out just where in all that gray matter to put them.

Deep brain stimulation, or DBS, has proved a powerful way to block the tremors of Parkinson's disease. Blocking mental illness isn't nearly as easy a task.

But a push is on to expand research into how well these brain stimulators tackle the most severe cases of depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette's syndrome — to know best how to use them before too many doctors and patients clamor to try.

Michael Crichton was a visionary science fiction author whose message was "be careful what you mess with."

I am not in any way saying this research is dangerous, but I am pretty impressed by the man's vision in a book written decades ago.

Then again, there is a team in Russia working on cloning a Woolly Mammoth. Maybe not from DNA extracted from a mosquito, but still...

We live in interesting times where we can catch up with science fiction in our lifetimes.

Stupid Criminals - REALLY Stupid

Maybe I can get this one up before Leno talks about it.

Say 'cheese': Thief breaks into surveillance camera store

Is it even possible for someone to be this stupid?

I mean really?

Prosecuted for Bad Taste

For sure, I would never hire this guy. He is clearly lacking any kind of judgment.

http://hypervocal.com/news/2011/youtube-musician-evan-emory-faces-20-years-in-prison-for-clever-editing/

But being crass, tasteless, and offensive is not, or at least should not be, illegal.
It certainly should not be a felony.

Yet here we have a prosecutor with, what, nothing better to do than make up ways to charge people who offend him with crimes, going after this guy.

His crime?
Singing a sexually explicit song and putting it up on YouTube.
So what? you ask?
The "so what" is his choice of editing.
Although he was singing alone with his camera, he edited the video as though he were singing to a bunch of little kids.

So now he is being charged with "manufacturing child sexually abusive material."

That law, as absurd as it is, was intended to criminalize making computer-generated graphics of sex acts with kids. Now we see what happens when vague, well-intended statutes get into the hands of people whose agendas go beyond the original intent.

Likely the prosecution will be found unconstitutional, hopefully the law itself will be as well. But this kind of malicious prosecution casts a chill on free expression that is vital for our society to function.

You may laugh at this guy's situation, but consider this:
The definition of "terrorist" is far more vague, as is "terrorist activities."
When do we reach the point when civil disobedience, which in previous times was at most a misdemeanor "disturbing the peace" charge becomes "domestic terrorism?"

We are on a slippery slope of criminalizing things that "people don't like" or worse, that "the government doesn't like" and I, for one, don't like where it is headed.

Ham Handed Foreign Policy

US starts Farsi Twitter account aimed at Iranians

Good gosh, WHY?

Why do we feel the need to meddle in these things?

As long as the USA can be painted as inciting unrest, the governments of these countries will have an easy means of vilifying the movement.

The people of these countries are perfectly capable of overthrowing their governments without any help or interference from anyone else. In fact, that is the only way it works.

Want to know how it is done?

There is a primer on the subject here:

From Dictatorship to Democracy

Read it, then let's discuss why the USA stirring the pot is a bad idea.

Les's End the NCAA Charade of "Amateur Athletes"

Former NCAA player's suit threatens Hollywood

This headline on Yahoo! News is more hype than fact.

Court cases typically are settled with the narrowest possible precedent. 

But there are a couple of interesting issues here that aren't being explored well.

One is the complete duplicity of the NCAA.

NCAA sports is a multi-billion dollar business.

Everyone makes lots of money.

Coaches, sponsors, promoters, the schools, the media.

Thousands of people are employed and made decent incomes.

The professional sports leagues, especially the NFL and the NBA, get a free farm system.

Everyone gets something, that is, except the talent.

What do they get?

IF they were recruited, they get a scholarship to maintain the illusion of the "student athlete" while devoting most of their emotional energy toward athletics rather than academics.

They get a lottery ticket for making it as a pro.

What this lawsuit is about, in reality, is that the talent who makes all of this profit possible gets nothing. The defendants are making it a 1st amendment issue because, frankly, it is the only way they have a chance of winning. But it isn't a first amendment issue.

Let's end the charade about "amateur athletics" being somehow more pure. The idea of "amateur status" actually originated in Victorian England as a means for the rich guys to exclude more talented, but "professional" athletes from their games. Those "professionals" couldn't afford to play for free, so a class system was established to demean their "professional" status as somehow mercenary.

The Olympics have gotten over it. Professional athletes routinely compete, because they want to attract the very best competitors.

Here is an idea. As radical as it sounds.

Pay them. 

Create a fund, as a percentage of gate, licensing and other revenue, that is equally distributed to the players. Don't put it in escrow or anything, just give them the money.

Idea #2 -

Play then school. Let's acknowledge that this is an entertainment industry. Let the athlete opt to play for his period of eligibility and then be eligible to get x years of scholarship at any NCAA school later. That is a win for everyone. If the player gets drafted, he can pursue that career, but he has something to fall back on if he is injured or cut. Some players might not pursue the  scholarship. And by making the scholarship eligible for any NCAA school, a more mature person can make more mature decisions about what he wants to pursue.

Simply put, if we treated the players fairly, this issue would have never come up. That is all Keller wants.

Google Law

New York Times reporter David Segal broke a story about how J.C. Penny had managed to rise to the top of Google searches for just about anything they sell.

Within days, hours actually, of informing Google of these results, Penny's place in these searches dropped from #1 to #70 or so.

J.C. Penny, of course, denies having anything to do with the scheme to plant tens of thousands of links in link-farm sites, but they did fire their search optimization consultants.

What is interesting to me, though, is how Mr. Segal uses the word "illegal" when describing search optimization strategies that violate Google's policies.

As pervasive as they are, Google is a private company. They may make whatever policies they choose about their search algorithms. They may publish guidelines of things they consider to be acceptable and unacceptable ways to raise your results. And they may sanction transgressions in any way they choose, so long as those sanctions to not run afoul of real laws.

But nothing you do, or do not do, to manipulate your Google search results is "illegal." There are no laws against it - except perhaps undisclosed collusion as the E.U. regulators are alleging.

Google's policies, though, are not laws. They do not carry the force of law. Let's stop using the term "illegal" to describe things that other people simply do not like.