Apparently, if this post causes you substantial emotional distress, Congress wants to put me in prison. Of course, that’s not how they characterize it. Again, we have more proposed legislation to protect the children. Which begs the question why say this, “with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass or cause Read more…
If you are thinking about visiting a big box home-improvement store, let us say for an example, the Lowe’s at 24500 Miles Road in Bedford Heights, Ohio, and you are, again let us say for an example, third in line at the checkout in the garden center, you might expect Read more…
I promise to get back to writing posts and inane music videos soon, but politics this week has just about made my head explode. I don’t even have the energy to rant anymore. I’m just going to bullet point some highlights: Americans may not know or care that the UK Read more…
If you want to dismiss any sort of protest, you do the following:
Works for anything, really, from a Million Man march to a WTO protest.
Seen the above a lot today, especially with Mr. Marc Cooper of the LA Times who makes himself look like a desperately frightened little twit shoving his fingers in his ears going “LALALALALALALA.”
Shall we talk of Mr. Cooper? (more…)
. Let’s start the week off with a brand new asshat, U.S. Attorney Timothy Morrison, from the Indiana Attorney General’s Office. You might think with my ranting about AIG bonus witch-hunts and such that Mr. Morrison might be guilty of making some grandstanding proclamations about nefarious evildoers who, somehow, have Read more…
ADDENDUM #4: Amazon has officially owned the cock up, still insisting it’s a glitch, but their poor customer relations has insured that about 75% of the public believe it’s all BS and they intended to do it. IMO is was a glitch, but a glitch in a nasty and troubling system that Amazon uses to suppress titles it doesn’t like. So this may be a good thing, as the PR backlash might encourage people to demand they remove all the de-ranking logic from their site. (After all, what’s the point when you cannot purchase anything w/o asserting you’re over eighteen anyway, unless it’s to protect the women and the servants.)
ADDENDUM #3: Amazon seems to be trying to fix this on the down low. No press comments, nothing on their site, but a little experimentation shows that rankings are re-appearing. MZB’s book from below has its rank back, as does Heather has Two Mommies. The History of Sexuality by Foucault is still SOL.
ADDENDUM #2: And Dear Author points out something that very strongly implies that whatever is happening at Amazon is happening on their own servers.
ADDENDUM: A very interesting theory brought to my attention by a tweet from Toby. Brings up other possibilities. Could Amazon have been the target of a botnet?
Again, we have an example why is it a really bad thing to have centralized distribution channels, either state or corporate. I pointed this out earlier with some e-book censoring going on with Apple’s iPhone application store. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised, but Amazon has decided to follow suit, and in a much more egregious fashion. They’ve decided that if your book is “adult” enough, well, they’ll just nuke the Amazon Rank for the title and make it impossible to find via search. Quoth one amazonian asshat:
In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature. (more…)
This is not a post about politics, per se. This is about criminal malfeasance, the sucking undertow of corruption in Washington D.C. that is shortly to drag the country down with it. If you’re wondering where the respect for the Constitution and the rule of law went, well our congress hasn’t had it for a long long time. We have created a self-entitled, self-important, self-aggrandizing political class that swear allegiance to nothing but their own position of power. They are a true ruling class, one to whom the rules of the common people do not apply. Perhaps you suffer from scandal fatigue, but think about this:
There are 435 seats in the House, 100 in the Senate. That is 635 people. Now take any random workplace in the country (assuming it’s a legal enterprise paying everyone above the table) having the same number of workers. How many of those people do you think engage in, say, real estate fraud? One? Two?
Ok, in the Congress we have Reps Pete Stark (D, CA) and Eliot Engel (D, NY) who both tried to skirt tax law by claiming their million-dollar Maryland residences as their permanent address. Then you have Charles Rangel’s laundry list of issues around real-estate, including forgetting to report 75K of rental income over a period of three years. Then we have Chris Dodd who has been desperately trying to blame the administration for language he put into the stimulus bill that seemed tailored explicitly to allow the AIG bonuses everyone’s in an uproar about, making almost everyone forget those wonderfully choice Countrywide perks he got back when there was no real-estate bubble. (Funny thing, AIG donated over a quarter million to Dodd’s campaign fund, but that’s probably just a coincidence.) And just to throw some republicans in the mix, we have California Rep. Gary Miller who’s being investigated by the FBI for trying to avoid a 31% tax on $10 million dollars worth of real estate transactions. We also have Arizona Republican Rick Renzi who has graduated from investigation to indictment last year, on 35 counts connected to land deals.
Here’s some background. There’s this little comedy show about current events, you might have heard of it, it’s called the Daily Show. There’s also this sotra-kinda-wants-to-be-a-cable-news-network-when-it-grows-up called CNBC. Now, if you’re asked to appear as a guest on the Daily Show, as Mr. Rick Santelli was, after going on a Read more…
Here’s the thing I’m trying to get across. All those of you who voted for change? Pretty much a Fail if you ask me. Not because I have anything in particular against Mr. Obama, but because Democrats and Republicans are pretty much the exact same creatures until you get on Read more…
How about Rahm Emanuel? You think it is a good idea for the State to watch your every move? Should the FBI, the ATF, the IRS and Customs and Immigration be able to track you wherever you go? Wouldn’t it be nice if every municipality was able to issue speeding Read more…