Where in the World is Snag?

Up there?



The woodcutty filter adds no detail at all.



Add some moosebats:

Yes We Can Can

A Avó a Bordar

Driving around for a bit with The Lovely Daughter so I will be entering your underpart of the internet intermittently for a couple of weeks, starting tomorrow. The power of automation will supply you with posts when I am not around.

Please learn this before I get back.



Estava o Julio em seu lugar
Veio o cachorro lhe cutucar
O cachorro no Julio
O Julio no Alípio
O Alípio na vaca
A vaca no avô
O avô na galinha
A galinha no galho
O galho no gato
O gato no rato
O rato na aranha
A aranha na mosca
A mosca na avó
A avó a bordar
Tic Tic Tic

Ó acabei!!
[fim]
Cocoricóóó

Danger

The New York Sun:

The court’s ruling that Congress does have the power to pass Obamacare under the taxing power is, to put it mildly, unconvincing. The court acknowledged that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act itself refers to the mandate by describing the consequences of a failure to obtain health insurance as a “penalty.” It says that the use of that description is “fatal” to the applicability of a law that says the court can’t hear a tax case at this stage of things, since it’s a penalty and not a tax. Then it turns around and says it’s not fatal to the ability of Congress to use the taxing power to pass the mandate in the first place. This is what the Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts, calls a “functional approach.”

Our guess is that distinction will strike most people as a lawyer’s self-parody. But we’re for bowing to the Court and throwing oneself into the political fray. The Court’s ruling sets up Governor Romney to remind us again that the taxing power is the most dangerous of the powers handed to the Congress.

Less dangerous:

WTF?

$24.95 my friends:

Toronto (ON), Canada – Zevrix Solutions today is thrilled to announce the release and immediate availability of BatchOutput PDF 1.0 for Mac OS X, a simple, powerful solution to printing multiple PDF documents. The software allows users to print unlimited PDF files in a queue, saving the time and effort of opening and printing each document manually.

As PDF has become the file format of choice in many offices because of its high versatility and multi-platform compatibility, many users have had difficulty finding a reliable, robust solution for batch printing PDFs. Now, BatchOutput PDF allows users to effortlessly print dozens of individual jobs, seamlessly, one after another. Users are free to continue working on their computer unimpeded, as the program works automatically in the background; or let it work while they’re on a lunch break; or even leave it working overnight to output hundreds of documents and the job will be done when they return in the morning.

I've gotta work on an AppleScript or an Automator action for that and sell it for $23.95.

But You CAN Have MICE Things

GUH-ROSS.

Okay, log in. Those with the wherewithal to navigate through Iran's database of scientific writing will find such treasures as this:



I know! I think it's cool too! And down there at the bottom? Handy RSS feeds for those who want to follow the subject or tangential aspects. Let's summon The Google™:



Now, I can't really recommend the RSS feed for "mouse" as a quick perusal of the relevant literature reveals that Iran has many more Wikipedia edits to go before it closes the mouse technology gap. Plus they spell it MOOSH or something which makes me fear for their baby-food industry. And, my bukkake-lovingfearing friends, I believe a mooshstache is probably something you do not want. Whereas:

All right then, moosetaches. They kind of look like bats though.

Speculations

Gee I wish I could follow the link she gives, but it just goes back to the main Corner page.

Until I can do that I will just have to wonder about what a Roman Catholic cardinal has to say about hurting poor children.

UPDATE!

Okay, the previous link was simply http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/

K-Lo has apparently found out there was a problem and adjusted the link to http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/304189/its-about-kids-not-contraception-kathryn-jean-lopez

Which just gets you back to that same post.

OH THE SUSPENSE.

THEY'RE NOT GONNA FIGURE IT OUT UPDATE!

The story's here. The lead-off quote:

"I am always perplexed when I see a discussion of this business. Surely, surely, the truth should outweigh political preference.”

Says the man who eats the flesh of his God every Sunday.

High on the list of potential victims are schoolchildren being served by the Catholic Church in the backyard of the federal government. “We have nearly 100 schools educating nearly 28,000 kids,” the cardinal says. In “the poorest part of the District of Columbia, we have 800 kids who simply need help getting an education.” Among the choices the Church will face if the Health and Human Services mandate goes into effect is preemptively closing the doors to those children — or being forced to do so as fines for noncompliance mount. At that point, these children “would be thrown back into those failing D.C. schools,” the cardinal says. “We’re giving them a chance.”

Good play! The children are your pawns! THAT lets you know who's a loving God, I tell you what.

Listing the saints whose feast days fall on the liturgical calendar during the Fortnight — Saint Thomas More and Saint John Fisher on June 21, John the Baptist on the 24th, Saints Peter and Paul on the 29th, and the Roman martyrs of the first century on the 30th — he emphasizes that “people who suffer for their faith weren’t all centuries ago. All you have to do is look around — Spain, Mexico, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania . . . In our lifetimes, people died rather than give up their religious faith, rather than violate their consciences.”

Not too many people know of the "throw them to the lions" clause Bill Ayers ghostwrote into the health-care plan, BUT IT'S THERE.

Asked how a narrative painting Catholic bishops as waging a partisan political campaign or a “war on women” can gain any traction, Cardinal Wuerl wonders if it isn’t simply “that old principle” at work: “If you say something often enough, people will start to believe you. If you say it over and over again, there are going to be some who say, ‘I guess that’s the case.’"

Do tell, corpse-eater, do tell.

A+ Trolling

I am baffled:

Rick Venema says:
June 26, 2012 at 7:01 pm

Providing an army for the common defense is a basic and legitimate function of the federal government. As to VSU, universities are funded at the State level, just as conservatives advocate.

And actually, Colonial Heights is also not too far from Richmond, and our Southpark Mall is the largest indoor climate-controlled shopping center between Richmond and Rocky Mount. Your lack of knowledge of my hometown is no doubt similar to your lack of knowledge of the Constitution.

Rick Venema
COLONIAL HEIGHTS, VIRGINIA

There really is a Rick Venema and he does appear to be dense, but come on. I feel like emailing this to Aaron Sorkin so everyone can hear it over and over again.

BECAUSE I CAN UPDATE:

Still More About Religion

Big Hollywood is mad at The Newsroom. There are one two three four FIVE stories on the front page right now. Let's look at number five by Licensed Hyperbolist™ Tony Lee. Watch this first:



Now Tony Lee:

[Jeff] Daniels and Aaron Sorkin, the show’s creator, were on “Piers Morgan Tonight” on Friday discussing the show when Morgan played the much-publicized clip in which [the Daniels character Will] McAvoy is asked by a college student why America is the best country in the world and goes on a tirade against America that is reflective of the scornful and shameful way in which Hollywood liberals, mainstream media elites, and academics in ivory towers feel about the greatest country known to man, which Abraham Lincoln referred to as “man’s last, best hope.”

Visions of an imaginary Even Bester Country in the World may differ.



Or course we are missing Disneyland and Slayer and New York and decent barbeque and we have too much tundra.

The refutation of the blasphemous speech written by Sorkin:

Will’s words and premise are demonstrably false and only believed by those who do not think America is exceptional and is no different or better than Brazil, Turkey, Canada, China, Spain, Kenya, or Azerbaijan.

I have this idea that here on this new-fangled internetty thing demonstrable falsehoods can be demonstrated with demonstratey goodness. Not even trying that looks silly, but I could be demonstrably wrong.

And despite the prevalence in the dominant popular culture of people like Sorkin and Daniels, who pal around with liberals like President Barack Obama, America still remains a shining city upon a hill. And if, God forbid, America ever ceases to be exceptional, it will be because of those in Hollywood, academia, and the mainstream media who, like Daniels, cheer McAvoy’s words and believe in their bones that McAvoy's sentiment about America is true.

People who do things mean nothing: it's all about belief.



THANK YOU M. BOUFFANT UPDATE:

Relationships

Via the handy Metafilter here are 10 Pranks That Will Spice Up Your Relationship. Read the comments.

Also, VAGINA.

The Humidity

The Lovely Daughter is off at a "new camper weekend" and later this summer she'll be gone for a week. Predictably the floogates of heaven have opened, so things there are an enhanced green. And purple.



Travellers must be careful as they risk fading away into nothingness.

Architects vs. Sexiness

A piece from an auction featuring work by architects:



Speaking for myself I am frightened of the brick-wielding chicks after that one time.

The Overkill Window

In a thread over here I made fun of Arnold Kling because he's a libertarian and he looks funny. Now that's hardly fair because I haven't paid attention to what Kling puts out since this ridiculous nonsense. Perhaps I am a very bad person who oh wait a minute:

However, I do not blame the poor results of President Obama's economic policies on lack of trust. The policies that were enacted when Democrats were in control of the House failed because they were wrong-headed, not because of a lack of trust. I understand that there is an alternative narrative in which the situation was worse than President Obama thought, and then the public stupidly voted in a Republican majority in the House in 2010, so nothing else could be done. But I do not see that narrative as having any merit beyond serving as a comforting bedtime story for those on the left.

My narrative would be closer to that of Walter Russell Mead. I view the left as tapped out, both intellectually and financially. They do not have the money to sustain their big projects (government health care, European integration). They do not have the intellectual fortitude to confront the problems inherent in, say, public sector unions, unfunded public sector liabilities, attempting to manage health care resources using government boards, or attempting to address inequality of economic outcomes by increasing the concentration of political power.

Below, Arnold Kling coping just fine with Libertopia:

Hurting Your Computer

Poor you. Poor Granny.



No Firefox, I do not want the goddamned smooth scroll turned on in your fucking update thank you.

People Love Rituals

This is kind of sweet:

Southern Methodist University officials say they will not press charges against a Dallas woman who allegedly forged a diploma and staged graduation from the Dedman School of Law.

[...]

The matter came to the university's attention when someone filed a report with SMU police. The person, whose name has not been released, claimed that [very bad person Michelle] Fyfe had produced a fraudulent law diploma and transcript.

Coworkers and friends said Fyfe also staged graduation in a room at the Park Cities Hilton in Aug. 2011. The hotel confirmed that the room was reserved under the name of an event planner who was hired by Fyfe.

If her fake degree was in computer graphics she wouldn't have had to rent a room.

The Firing Squad

Loomis vs. Greenwald purity battle.

More Lazyblogging

You may thank your lucky stars that Dr. Mario here did not emerge out of a certain picture with his speech balloon containing "Christ what an asshole."

Old news for colour-vision specialists.

If you don't stop killing our kids we'll kill our kids!

MIRANSHAH: A militant group threatened action on Saturday against anyone conducting polio vaccinations in the region where it is based, saying the healthcare drive was a cover for U.S. spies.

The group, based in North Waziristan and led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur, said it had banned vaccinations for as long as U.S. drone aircraft continued to make missile strikes in Pakistan.

It cited the case of Shakil Afridi, the doctor who, Pakistani sources say, helped the CIA find Osama bin Laden through a vaccination drive in the town where he was living.

"As long as drone strikes are not stopped in Waziristan there will be a ban on administering polio jabs," said the group, which is believed to have an unofficial non-aggression pact with the Pakistani military.

Pop quiz: Do you know what Warchild holds in all those pockets? WAR.

The News

The kindergarten across the street produced a newspaper. Forgive the clumsy joins but the thing was all crumply in my too-small scanner.

Prosecutorial Discretion

John "Law is inviolate" Yoo:

President Obama’s claim that he can refuse to deport 800,000 aliens here in the country illegally illustrates the unprecedented stretching of the Constitution and the rule of law. He is laying claim to presidential power that goes even beyond that claimed by the Bush administration, in which I served. There is a world of difference in refusing to enforce laws that violate the Constitution (Bush) and refusing to enforce laws because of disagreements over policy (Obama).

...

Imagine the precedent this claim would create. President Romney could lower tax rates simply by saying he will not use enforcement resources to prosecute anyone who refuses to pay capital-gains tax. He could repeal Obamacare simply by refusing to fine or prosecute anyone who violates it.

Indeed. What would happen if President Obama just stopped prosecuting thieves?

Lazy Posting

Just linkage while I read news.

The Mommy-Fight Site

“Here's Your Newborn Dead Baby, Ma'am”

Bring me the knuckle of John the Baptist: Scientists claim 'positive' tests on 1st-century relics which are from one man, from the right place at the right time

When archaeologists claimed to have found the bones of John the Baptist amid the ruins of an ancient Bulgarian monastery experts were understandably sceptical.

But carbon dating tests carried out at Oxford University have provided scientific evidence to support the extraordinary claim.

A knucklebone has been dated to the 1st Century AD - a time when the revered Jewish prophet is believed to have lived.

Re: this from mikey, ‘Gray Eagle’ Drone Fails All the Time, But Army Still Wants More

'Game of Thrones' Bush head episode spiked from HBO Go, iTunes Boy, that Apple sure is a great company.

New Todd Solondz movie!!!

Medical Credentials

Here is Vladivostok State Medical University.



It will come as no surprise to followers of medical literature that Vladivostok State Medical University is Mario-approved.



GOGGLE TRANSLATE™ UPDATE:

The Troller Elite

Optimism!

Now according to the BBC, new government legislation will soon be put in place and added to the Defamation Bill that will require all kinds of websites and social networks to hand over the details of anyone who posts defamatory content online.

Great news? Sort of. On one hand, we'd finally be able to stop those really persistent idiots that ruin our web experience and have previously thought they were safe through cyberspace anonymity.

What an excellent use of police resources. I guess the anti-proxy/anti-Tor law comes next.

NO WAIT UPDATE:

What comes next is austerity:

The government's "online snooping" scheme to track email, Facebook, Twitter and other web use comes with an official pricetag of at least £1.8bn and an official warning that the figure may well prove to be an underestimate, the Home Office has revealed.

Ministers have already agreed to pay all the costs of the scheme, which will require phone and internet companies to collect and store for 12 months the records of internet and mobile phone use in Britain for access by police and intelligence services.

Maybe they could just make everyone use Internet Explorer.

Learning

The first version of that was 32 megabytes. It still kind of sucks, but I think I'm getting the idea after the smackdown I gave myself over here.

ALSO:

Most of the good GIFs from the post mentioned above came from here. I like him.

The Bizarro World

Jonah thinks people speculating about Ronald Reagan being unable to win a current Republican primary are silly:

Jeb Bush has rekindled one of the dumber political talking points of recent years by saying that Reagan couldn’t get nominated today. While I think it’s perfectly legitimate to talk about what Reagan believed and how things have evolved since he was president, the way this topic is generally used is to say that today’s Republicans are too extreme blah blah blah.

That's important and it's some of that formulation, but the other part of it is that he isn't Ronald Reagan he is Saint Reagan and "WWRD?" is, you know, a thing. It's not just about examining the thoughts of respected thinkumator Ronald Reagan Ph.Dead, it's about whether or not you're paying attention to the holy writ that you insist is so holy that you don't pay attention to it. Watch this:

Too little attention is paid to the basic fact that Reagan was a man of his times and the times have changed. For instance, much of the GOP’s “extreme” opposition to tax increases stems from lessons learned from Reagan’s experience. Democrats promised to cut spending if Reagan raised taxes. They didn’t cut spending. Reality-based Republicans don’t want to repeat that mistake. Likewise, Reagan agreed to amnesty for illegal immigrants in 1986. Rather than be a one-time deal, it proved to be an incentive for more illegal immigration. And so on. The upshot of so much of the “Reagan was too reasonable for today’s GOP” blather assumes that Reagan wouldn’t have learned from what turned out to be mistakes — and that today’s Republicans shouldn’t either.

Got that? Saint Reagan in the heavens really wants what we want now, and he tut-tuts his mouldering corpse about them Messicans.

If you want to freeze presidents in amber and hold them against today’s political realities, virtually no former president could win their respective party’s primaries today. FDR was adamantly opposed to public-sector unionism. How would that work for him in today’s Democratic Party? John F. Kennedy was a foreign-policy hawk who didn’t care much about civil rights and believed in cutting taxes to stimulate the economy. Would he win a Democratic primary?

Okay and yes.

Times change and politicians change with them. I have few doubts that given Reagan’s principles and the political realities of today, he’d be a mainstream conservative with deep sympathies for the Tea Party. But you can’t blow up the space-time continuum, and if Reagan were alive today, he couldn’t win the GOP nomination — not because he’d be too liberal but because he’d be 101 years old.

HAW! His brain would also be Swiss cheese.

APORKALYPSE

Where are the Meme Police when you need them?




More ridiculous pics at the source, which is of course a UK paper. So it's apparently really a dog or something.

History Is Bunk

This image via Reddit:



Hmm...not very readable. So from here:

He began by asking me what position I was going to be hired in or was being considered for, and I said it was as a professor in the history department. The very next words out of his mouth were -- and I'm not exaggerating; these were seared into my memory -- Elder Packer said, "I have a hard time with historians, because historians idolize the truth." I almost sunk into my chair. I mean, that statement just bowled me over.

Then he went on to say, quoting him as accurately as I can ...: "The truth is not uplifting. The truth destroys. And historians should tell only that part of the truth that is uplifting, and if it's religious history, that's faith-promoting." And he said, "Historians don't like doing that, and that's why I have a hard time with historians."

It's not hard to believe that a Mormon might have a hard time with history, because the founder of the religion was a scam artist and a nut who knew nothing. More plausible than Scientology though.

Data Porn

Go here for a bunch of ways to make information purty.



PROCESSING UPDATE:

Forgot about how easy it is to play with things in Processing. Code on the left, result on the right. I should learn more about it. I can't, however, figure out how I'm supposed to get the result onto Google's weird website templates.

Giving Republicans Advice

I dunno, when things are sucking you don't have to be much more than The Other Guy and try not to alienate people. A true believer like Scott Walker has a program to run against.

Symbolism

Some poor fool:

As we await today's major announcement from the OC, another sneak preview of what'll soon be the Catholic world's second-largest traditional instrument of worship....

Let us pause to snicker.

But HOLY SHIT the Crystal Cathedral is gonna be Catholic now.

God clearly thinks protestants aren't molesty enough.

OPML Update

Here are about two thousand feeds you can import to the RSS reader of your choice. I think I have all the duplicates eliminated, but I did add some reprehensible items via a little browse through Google's feeds and bundles so I may find out What Tom Friedman and Michelle Malkin think is important. The amount of programming content is somewhat balanced out now, but there's still a little too much marketing/business/motivational happy-talk for my taste. I find Google Reader sucks for this much stuff, but then I think Google Reader sucks anyway. There are plenty of alternatives out there that handle an information overload in a better way.

Even geekier portion of this post:

When I gathered all these feeds together there were a lot of duplicate feeds, and figuring those out was a pain in the ass because a lot of people had customized the names and descriptions and so forth. What to do?

It helps to know that an OPML file is just text, and that NetNewsWire will fetch descriptions for you. So here's a line of text representing the feed for Super Colossal (which is great but sadly not recently updated):

<outline text="Super Colossal" description="" title="Super Colossal" type="rss" version="RSS" htmlUrl="http://supercolossal.ch" xmlUrl="http://supercolossal.ch/feed/"/>

Pretty readable: there's text, an empty description, a title, and then some things that look less irrelevant. So, if we have a second line in the file that says

<outline text="Also Super Colossal" description="It's got stuff about building things" title="Also Super Colossal" type="rss" version="RSS" htmlUrl="http://supercolossal.ch" xmlUrl="http://supercolossal.ch/feed/"/>

it's going to appear out of order on the list and eliminating a duplicate is tough (time-consuming really). TextWrangler to the rescue, one of the ultimate Mac freebies for geeks. TextWrangler does grep, a very powerful and dangerous kind of search if you don't know what you're doing. I frequently don't know what I'm doing, but I just don't care, so on we went. Since we know NetNewsWire will fetch text and title and description, all we have to do is wipe those for the 2800 feeds in the file. Easy! So here's a search that more or less means look for anything that says 'title="anything"' and replace it with an emptied version:



And there's the result:



So you just do that a couple more times for the other fields - I guess you could do text=".*?" description=".*?" title=".*?" and get it all done at once but I wasn't smart enough to think of it at the time and grep and ambition don't match well with n00bs - and then the fields are wiped. TextWrangler can then put selected lines in order and then process them in various ways, like removing duplicate lines:



And there we go, a whole bunch of feeds eliminated. DKW would do it in Excel, but I swear TextWrangler is faster. Down to around 2100. Empty out NetNewsWire, reimport the cleaned up OPML and it'll acquire the right text and description and title on its own. And if the feeds vary slightly - one's RSS and one's Atom - it's pretty likely that when NetNewsWire gathers information about the feed it's gonna show up next to its not-quite-duplicated partner anyway, and you can get rid of that pretty easily.

Posting a Video

Sing along with me!

Bow Before Our Syllables

Here is a Microsoft computer geek jerking it:

You do want to remind your early adopters that they're dealing with things that are not completely baked. There are ways to do that, and there are other ways.

Here's us:

Disclaimer

This is a preliminary document and may be changed substantially prior to final commercial release of the software described herein.

Here's them:

Not for the faint of heart
Canary is designed for developers and early adopters, and can sometimes break down completely.

Nightly updates
Canary changes almost every day.

So...is this post manifesting some level of shame? I'll set aside my general whining about Google and take the last one thanks.

Meet the New Boss

He ate the old boss:

And what a business it is. The firm was forced to pull back the curtain on its famously secretive doings to go public, and what it revealed shocked even seasoned commodities traders. Glencore, which Reuters once called "the biggest company you never heard of," turned out to be far more globally dominant than analysts had realized. According to its 1,637-page IPO prospectus, the company controlled more than half the international tradable market in zinc and copper and about a third of the world's seaborne coal; was one of the world's largest grain exporters, with about 9 percent of the global market; and handled 3 percent of daily global oil consumption for customers ranging from state-owned energy companies in Brazil and India to American multinationals like ExxonMobil and Chevron. All of which, the prospectus said, helped the firm post revenues of $186 billion in 2011 and employ some 55,000 people in at least 40 countries, generating an average return on equity of 38 percent, about three times higher than that of the gold-standard investment bank Goldman Sachs in 2010. Since then, the company has only gotten vaster in scale. It recently announced a $90 billion takeover of Xstrata, a global mining giant in which it already holds a 34 percent stake; if the deal goes through, Glencore will rule over an "empire stretching from the Sahara to South Africa," as the Africa Confidential newsletter put it. As it is, Glencore already trades, manufactures, refines, ships, or stores at least 90 commodities in some three dozen countries. "Glencore is at the center of the raw material world," said Peter Brandt, a longtime commodities trader. "Within this world there are giants, and Glencore is becoming a giant among giants."

Eventually there will be one thing to rule us all.

Low-Quality Reportage

Important!



The problem with this story is that they could have done a little basic journalism and chose not to: do these animals really have a shot at predicting the winners of Euro Cup games? Pick up the goddamned phone and consult the psychic chicken.

TIMELY COMMENTING UPDATE:

Over here:




Piglet is a regular contributor.

The Utility of Hippies

Vancouver is one of those lucky places in which the people who initially mapped out the city - elites for Christ's sake - did a bunch of good stuff by setting some land aside for, um, the future of civilization or something. Stanley Park is a great example. Except for kicking out those natives who already lived there of course. WHOOPS.

Another example of native-kicking-out-and-setting-land-aside is this, the UBC Endowment Lands. Both properties are now the most valuable land there could possibly be in the city, and yet nobody's sold it all to developers from Hong Kong.

Look:



The end of the little penis sticking up is Stanley Park, a short walk from anything downtown, and the end of the big penis sticking out to the left including that awful greenish infection it has is pretty much all university land.

On the university's land there is a research farm set up by people who sing songs and write poems and also have advanced degrees. The Lovely Daughter is lucky enough to have one of these hippies as her teacher, so her class heads out to do some farming every second Thursday. FOR NO PAY.

[COMMENCE THUNDERBLOGGING]











Above I was being a little idealistic about our fabulously wise use of land. Here go some trees just outside the farm's parking lot:



But even that stuff has the hippie tinge.

ALSO: