What Does a Mechanical Frog Say?

Robot robot.

That is all.

Justified Usage

Via Atrios, via Prospect, via the Chron...everybody's doing it so why can't I?

Advocating putting people in the gas chamber for writing newspaper articles that make the government unhappy is reason enough to say "Melanie Morgan is a Nazi" and have the label stick. Not that anyone should be climbing all over themselves and pointing fingers and yelling "Hitlah!" at everyone who once had a nose browned with Bush bum, but you know, if the skin lampshade's looking nice in the living room, what more needs to be said?

Yes, yes, she was talking about what might happen after a conviction for treason, but that just means she doesn't know what the fuck she's talking about it in the first place.

Workers of the World Unite

Fans of both butchered English and the idea of labour as soul-destroying misery may find amusement/distress in this list of vocations from the Ministry of Science and Education of the Ukraine.

Among the highlights:

Facing worker with thin slab
The seller from a tray (in the market)
Mechanic of bodies repair
Collector of top of footwear
Tighten shoes man
Younger medical sister of a caring of the patients
Painer
Turner - whirling man
Moulder of sausage products
Machinist of scraper (scraperist)
Incrustationer
Collector of a bottom of footwear
Rolling Meat maker
Meat and subproducts Cuter
Elector-erector of schemes
Defectoscoper on magnetic test
The inspector of the orders
Sewing man of leather fancy good products
Improvised of Steel maker of electroslag remelting
Rewinding man of a string
Machinist of the bulldozer (mountain robots)
Forcemeat maker
Crush man (chemical industry)
Spray of a stone (manufacture of art products)
Centrifuge man (Lemon, vine stone acids production)
Artist of tiny painting
Mechanic - collector of flying devices
Composer of trains
Beet cutting man

Aging Ears

Went to a Chinese store for some junk food at lunch, heard some yowling yet syrupy drivel on the radio and assumed it was another ordinary and embarrassing Chinese take on Western pop. Approached register, paid, and realized it was midway through Whitney Houston's Greatest Love bullshit.

My Widening Influence

Always nice when you get what you want. I finished a re-read of The Third Policeman this morning, and I'll have to get to At Swim-Two-Birds again soon.

What did I actually want? Another way to think about The Third Policeman. Rather than ask for that specifically I figured Thers would have something useful to say about Flann O'Brien anyway, and fucked if he didn't deliver. This reaffirms my faith in psychic powers or something.

Astrology?

Why so respectful?

As for the stat cited, how many really comprehensive polls have been done on astrology? Do people answering yea or nay actually pay attention to astrology in a serious way or do they just agree that a Scorpio is a trouble-maker but hot in bed? That is, I dunno what kind of depth people assenting to astrological interest will generally go into when answering a broad poll question.

It's Only Part I

Jeff Goldstein in all his glory, without having to visit the site. Let there be cock.

Academic Freedom

Holy. Quite a wonderful speech.

The Urchin's Own: What I meant by being a Muslim fundamentalist

The Urchin's Own: What I meant by being a Muslim fundamentalist

Having a little debate about fundamentalism with a guy who appears to be nice and sincere. However, there are mythical elements to be dealt with, such as a completely consistent Qur'an and the idea that all muslims swallow everything whole and inerrant. Not the case, and a good thing too, at least for various science departments in universities throughout the Islamic world.

The Lazy Kind of Blog Post

Re-reading Fiskadoro. Yup, that's about it.

Bloggers are Broken

It is interesting to note that this blog entry has attracted 34 responses versus only 4 for your last 10 entries. Conclusion… your reputation and wisdom is respected in your field of expertise. Take this as a vote of confidence in striking new ground and setting different standards in the world of jounalism. Submit a paper for academia to dedate.

Alternate conclusion: it made boingboing and many commenters thought it was dumb enough to add a comment.

The title's a cliche and it goes downhill from there, confusing the selling of journalism with the journalism itself, and I suspect not even considering the work-a-day journalism as most people use it: opinion doesn't make a lot of difference or sense if someone wants to find out about the bank-robbery that happened in the mall, or whether or not the hotel tax passed, what the weather's likely to be and so on.

The five Ws and an H still have an enormous constituency, whether in print, on-line, or on TV. They also make money. If this audience is being eroded due to other options, that's the way it goes, and it's not a death-knell or even a surprise, but it shouldn't be taken as a given that the basic enterprise of journalism - attempting to deliver unvarnished facts - is unwanted or unwise, especially when you consider that opinion-based journalism - that fabulous Fox News everyone should seek to emulate - helped gull the US into an idiotic war.

I await an article entitled Boys are Broken in which tampering with the brains of males is advocated because girls are doing better on tests.

Online Integrity

Thersites has had a little dust-up. We hope all goes well. He's a fine writer.

Rephrasing the Argument

I left this at Melinda's (that is, if it passes muster):

I'm still at a loss as to why run-at-the-mouth atheists need to have an article written about them. There's an overall subject that begs to be written about, which is simply zealotry or tribalism, and rather
than tackle the larger subject you go for the one in which you can isolate and crucify a teensy number of blowhards (like minnie mouse, who seems to require a prescription).

I saw on some network somewhere a show about The Rationalist Society, a group of people in India who perform an extraordinary service for villagers: they go from town to down performing magic tricks and show how they're done so that the villagers don't get suckered by visiting godmen who'll try to cure a potentially fatal snakebite with magic instead of medicine. Their atheism, in other words, saves lives. At the same time, it seemed to me that the documentary was evidence that they had become a tribe of their own, with rules, orthodoxy, chants, and so forth. They had become a tribe of sorts while explicitly
existing to burst the bubbles of tribal culture. (My description comes from one half-remembered documentary, so take it with a grain of salt.)

In any case, people form tribes naturally, and some people take it too much to heart and become assholes. The way to write about this in the case of atheists is not to deal with the arguments, which, even if you identify them as outrageous are rarely as ridiculous as religious arguments, but to identify X argument as the rallying point that attracts the stupids that may accrete to the atheist "cause". (Anthropologists tend not to add "this is of course bullshit" to descriptions of tribal beliefs.)

There may be other aspects of the culture that produce mindless woofing or backslapping or spittle-sprays. If there's some sort of ceremonial aspect to the behaviour (as there was under the supposedly atheistic communist regimes) point to that as evidence of tribalism.

There are chunks of this to re-write or rephrase, but I gotta go.

Penetrating Insight

This is terribly old news, but this entertainingly-written summary deserves life:

Arse & All

by Jim Provenzano

On April 1, 2001, Australian rugby player John Hopoate (pronounced "hop-o-wotty") announced his resignation from the West Tigers club. His resignation followed widespread publicity after the National Rugby League judiciary a week before handed down a 12-match suspension for unsportsmanlike conduct. Hopoate, a winger, was suspended for jabbing his fingers into North Queensland players' anuses.

More Nice Firefox Extensions

Let's say something nice again. Well, only two things.

Nuke Anything Enhanced is a tool that lets you clear up crap on a web-page. Something bugging you? Remove it. Stupid background or foreground image getting in the way? Remove it. Blinking tag? Gone.

Tab Mix Plus is the king of extensions for making Firefox do what you want it to do. My most crucial uses are making new tabs appear to the right of the current tab instead of at the far right of every tab open. My tabs are also marked in red until I read them, when they turn black. They're all the same size so that I don't have to adjust when I click them away. I can organize and drop them where I want on the tab bar. This makes reading random news items so much easier it's like a reinvention of the web for me.

Quoth Larry DeRita

You talk about "rumsfeld's fondest ideas and theories" as if you have the first clue as to what those are. I have worked with him side-by-side for five years, and I wouldn't even try to divine what his fondest ideas and theories are.

DeRita is apparently Rumsfeld's spokesman. Thanks for not trying.

5 Professors Quit Religious School

The Only Source of
the Truth

PATRICK HENRY COLLEGE
5 Professors Quit Religious School
Some Complain of Academic Constraints at Loudoun Institution
By Michael Alison Chandler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 19, 2006; Page B05

Nearly a third of the faculty members at Patrick Henry College in
Loudoun County are leaving the school because of what they described
as limitations on their academic freedom, causing unusual
introspection at the politically connected Christian liberal arts
college.

They claim that Patrick Henry College, established in 2000 to attract
academically gifted home-schoolers with the hope of send them on to
work on Capitol Hill or at the White House, does not value equally
both parts of its mission: to offer students a strong biblical
perspective while educating them according to a classical liberal
arts curriculum. In one case, the professors said, faculty members
were reprimanded for writing that the Bible "is not the only source
of truth."

[...]

Death

The Deathbed Joke Project

Firefox

I don't appear to have anything original to say, so I'll try something mildly constructive.

Here's what I browse with: Firefox.

I also use a Mac, and Firefox is probably the clunkiest and slowest browser for it. Still, with the right extensions it does things that nothing else does.

The right extensions:

Adblock: does what it says, and you can alter the list of included items, urls, blah blah.

Adblock Filterset.G Updater: a set of continually updated filters for the above. I rarely see adds for anything anywhere.

BugMeNot: right-click in a field and get a log-in for a surprising variety of sites. Registering is a pain in the ass, and why bother if you don't need to.

Download Manager Tweak: I'd rather have a new tab than the other options, and this lets me have it the way I want. I note there are a couple of negative comments at the link; I've had no problems.

Fasterfox: a much-hated bandwidth drainer according to a lot of webmasters. Oh well: Firefox is already pokey on a Mac (quite terrific on a PC) so I need an advantage. Improper tweaking can apparently cause poor performance, so use with caution.

Greasemonkey: customize the way Firefox sees certain sites, pages, what have you. I look for pictures using Google Image Search so I use two Greasemonkey scripts that help with the process: one makes the search for large images only so I don't have to fuck with it every time, the other makes the thumbnails link directly to the images instead of to a page. Instant image-stealing-Photoshop-heaven. If you're smarter than me - show of hands please - you can write your own scripts.

Image Zoom: better control over images; fit them to the window and so on.

Linky: open multiple links in multiple tabs at once, or multiple images in a single tab, or open multiple links while ignoring the ones you've already visited. A good research tool.

More later, maybe.

Melinda Barton

Whackjob.

However, what is the last refuge of a small, marginalized minority under tremendous external pressure (such as a real attack on their rights and/or rapid social/political/economic changes that result in great anxiety and fear) with limited political power? Terrorism. By the logic you've employed, Al Quaeda would pose no threat to us b/c they're not taking over a political party. Neither would the Christian Identity Movement b/c there are only 350,000 CIM members in America, Canada, and Great Britain combined, they are seriously marginalized, and they have no real political power.
Do I think "atheist extremists", or "antitheist extremists" if that works better for you, will necessarily become terrorists. No. But I also don't think we should allow tunnel vision to set in. Just b/c the enemy before us is great, doesn't mean there isn't an enemy sneaking up from behind. Remember: the religous right was once a marginalized minority within the right that the left refused to take seriously as a potential threat.

Sounds eerily Malkinish.