the following is an excerpt from a recent telephone conversation between Utah Senator Orrin Hatch and a mysterious major religious denomination leader:

mystery-leader-X: now Orrin, you’ve realize that there are way more active women the Church than men right
Hatch: of course, everyone knows that because women are penalized more for inactivity and falling away from Church teachings than men, and they’re trained to be more gullible within our Church programs as well
leader-X: well, then we both also understand that our Church welfare system only gives assistance to who are active in our Church, and pay a full tithe, etc
Hatch: certainly, I wouldn’t think about giving my charity to an organization that did not discriminate in such a fashion
leader-X: excellent. Well lets put these two facts together. It is inevitable that there will be many single mothers who are active in our church
Hatch: uh huh…
leader-X: yes. and it is also inevitable that they will often have circumstances where the traditionally meager pay in our great and beloved state will cause these mothers to fall short in things such as unexpected health expenses. even young families with less earning power are falling short and requiring assistance from our “fast offering”
Hatch: so you’re saying, that its these health expenses are taking a bite out of Church coffers because of the number of poor families without adequate health care for their children. now I thought fast-offering was separate from tithing?
leader-X: yes, technically it is. but really this money all comes from the same source; the wage earning members. also, when a family hits hard times they tend to pay us less tithing and also have less money in fast-offerings. with less money we have less money thus less power and control over people and resources we dole out on a meager basis
Hatch: i see where you’re going with this. you need me to…
leader-X: let’s be clear here. I don’t need you, God need’s you. this came whilst i was pondering solemly in the holy-of-holies, that very room where you and I met years ago when the last Senator, what was his name, heh.. fell out of line
Hatch: got it. God needs me to vote with the satanic democrats to have the government pay health care money, so the Church gets more donation money! I will take this very seriously
leader-X: think of it this way; would you appreciate your Temple visits so much if there was simply a $10,000 dollar chandelier in the Celestial room? no. I dare say the Lord would be reluctant to visit such a room. we need at least a $100,000 chandelier for the Lord’s spirit to be present with our faithful temple worshipers
Hatch: make sure God knows I’m on it. I shall collude with the wicked Democrats.. oh hey what about that Harry Reid guy…
leader-X: just please dont mention him, those saints in Nevada i just don’t know.

Posted by admin as Required at 3:32 PM CEST

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Anatoliy Dyatlov had been working as a nuclear engineer at the same plant for quite some time. Generating cheap, safe, and efficient electricity for millions of users for important things like idling computers, powering DSL modems when nobody is home, keeping refrigerators full of moldy leftovers operational. Avoiding brownouts so that important devices like electric toothbrush chargers, xbox 370s, and iPhones http://www.apple.com/iphone do not become permanently damaged. As you know keeping a nuclear reactor is not a trivial task suitable for just anyone like those who head up customer service departments.

With his serious training it was obvious Anatoliy was serious about safety. He decided it was time to upgrade the computers from the “old fashioned” main-frame and dumb-terminal based system to a Windows XP system (replacing the terminals). MS-SQL server running on Windows XP Server spread across 4 or 5 machines would replace the clunky old reliable main-frame.

Thanks to windows XP he and his crew was reminded about very important occurances on their computers they would never have been aware about previously under the old setup. While running computer simulations of various reactor states the Taskbar usefully notified a crewmember that “You Have Unused Icons”. This Windows spread the responsibility of marginally important computer tasks to everyone, not just the nerdy IT guys. It was a breakthrough and perhaps after so long the help desk could be phased out entirely thanks to Windows. It was a Wednesday morning, and another of his crew was notified during examination of controls that there was a “Critical Update” and that “You’ve received an Instant Message”.

These were surely important events because they came from the computer, and Windows was designed to make sure these events seemed every bit as important to a user as the applications a user actually chose to run on their own. This is another great feature. The users aren’t trusted to know what is the most important, nor are the applications themselves (especially non Microsoft affiliated applications, like the nuclear simulators). Its kind of a breakthrough because before the user would just be lost in their own world of whatever program they were using, not realizing they had unused icons or mysterious software “updates” that are so critical to the modern computing experience. Upon turning on the interface to the reactor (which was a USB device) users learned that “This device could perform faster with USB 2.0”. So now the engineers can spend time figuring out what the hell USB 2.0 is and if it really has anything to do with how they plugged it in. Perhaps the cord is too long? Perhaps the hub they are using is antiquated? Oh wait, it’s the device itself? Well now what. Nevermind. Employees devote time to use the world wide web and see if they have updated the nuclear reactor USB 2.0 interface cards through Shopping.Yahoo.Com. Thankfully Yahoo has installed so many toolbars on internet explorer there is not much room to view the web pages themselves, content can be distracting.

Posted by admin as Required at 4:28 AM CEST

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I recall with satisfaction to a time when I was about 18. A family trip found me at a US Civil War battlefield and a curator was pointing at an old building she claimed to have been commandeered as a field hospital at some point after a particularly nasty battle. To shock the crowd she recounted written descriptions of how doctors would perform surgery as quickly as they could on the many wounded, hacking limbs off and simply tossing the discarding masses of flesh outside via the nearest window.

With news of the Iraq war and the record number of dismemberments because of the nature of fighting: why are people acting like it’s some new thing? The Civil War had a far higher rate of occurrence of amputees, and live body mutilation as a result of the nature of warfare. Are people really such big idiots? Like this MSNBC article http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4478134/ is probably just an attempt to gloss a cute “positive” story in the Iraq war. Really that’s the only positive news from the Iraq war that poor young folks (and yes, literally poor because of the bad pay) have some chance of retaining partial use their heavily damaged limbs. And those who’s limbs are completely disintegrated can use one of the thousands of new bizzare replacement body parts. The Civil War saw the development of Plastic Surgery as a discrete medical art. Many improvements to what we take for granted like crutches, wheelchairs, and the like.

The first time I learned about mastectomies I was probably about 12 or 13. This is a simple procedure where the female breast is hacked off usually because of some nominal malady like a cancerous infection. Thanks to Sports Illustrated and Monte Python’s: The Meaning of Life I had developed certain tastes. It was only at this point when I was 18 I could put the two together finally: having bad luck with procuring live visual events and the unappealing nature of expensive pay-form venues I reckoned there was a feasible alternative. My hometown was a regional center for health care in the Midwest, but was a relatively small city with a very laid back police and lax security at most commercial establishments. Needless to say how things went down, it certainly made me a happy boy.

Posted by admin as Effyou at 3:44 AM CEST

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Presidential Candidate Barack Obama and rival to Hillary Clinton brilliantly retorted to criticism that he was a naive idiot concerning foreign policy by announcing a naive and idiotic foreign policy. Successfully distancing himself from Hillary, Obama promised he was willing to be even less careful and more aggressive with military incursions into foreign countries without their permission. He promised to insult and alienate an important American and NATO ally in the occupation of Afghanistan. He also promised he would insult, alienate, and incite the inhabitants of a proud Muslim nation in political crisis by invading it under a similar premise that George Bush uses to continue his occupation in Iraq. In “Obama threatens military force against Al Qaeda in Pakistan” (Chicago Tribune) he is quoted using similar fear-baiting rhetoric Bush-Cheney administration has become so famous for. “…There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again…. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharaf will not act, we will.”. Just lovely, he promises to use a strange Axe Wielding Ogre mentality that not even Bush has the nerve to enact or even threaten to enact. This would make for strange and confusing U.S. Diplomacy when just weeks ago, Obama promised he would talk to each and every criminal dictator the world has to offer in his first year as president. If Obama does win election it will be worse than Carter, the last time a religious ignorant Democrat with little experience was elected president. Personally, I am not that worried so long as Obama makes all his slip-ups during his campaigns, which seems to be the way its going. I never would have thought he would describe a foreign policy even more brazen and dangerous than Bush-Cheney would come up with!

My question is: why is the media reporting this as a horse race? Maybe that expression is cliche, but really, why? Why do I see headlines like “Obama: If Pakistan doesn’t hit Al Qaeda, US must” that seem strait out of the campaign PR department? Why not describe the foriegn policy he actually sets out and cut out all the rhetoric in a similar manner I did instead of horse race coverage. They dwell on the idea that he is countering criticism from the Hillary camp, but BIG DEAL. Obama is announcing what is a very radical shift and potentially very dangerous in an unstable nuclear power like Pakistan: to invade their territory whenever we feel like they aren’t “doing enough”. And the fact Obama uses shameless rhetoric needs to be pointed out. It is irresponsible they just repeat the rhetoric without pointing it out as rhetoric. The rhetoric I am referring to is very powerful and provocative “Al Queda…who murdered 3,000 Americans”. Well, it isn’t exactly accurate is it knowing what we know?

We lost our chance to do much of anything in Pakistan a long time ago. Osama and the like will have to be caught on the terms of the nation(s) in which he dwells. It is a fact of life that might be hard to accept for those that lead or wish to lead a nation that thinks itself to be all-powerful. This means long-term strategy. Terrorism was not stamped out in the U.K. overnight. It had roots that were long reaching, and the solution had to be deep rooted. The same obviously applies here, but as long as important candidates like Obama ignore this with pandering and dangerous rhetoric no problems surrounding the arab/islamic terrorism problem will ever be solved.

Posted by admin as Effyou at 2:43 AM CEST

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I will have to try very hard to keep myself from cursing furiously as construct these sets of thoughts. For a long time I have thought there are fundamental problems with the way news is dispersed on television. Let us say we are watching the news. Specifically the national news: it often discusses SERIOUS events that might have a direct impact or that viewers might be seriously attached to mentally. You hear a serious story, ends with a note, the audience is thinking something serious and all the sudden your brain gets raped with an impaling barrage of nonsense about how important it is to buy soda, food, or whatever else. This might seem like an old tired rant, but let’s describe a similar situation that can occur all the more disturbing and mentally insulting.

I was reading an article about a deadly explosion at one of Burt Rutan’s (of SpaceShipOne fame) so-called “space pads” at the Mojave airfield in California. The article titled “Blast at desert spaceport kills 3″ and it seemed the death count had gone up since I last read about it. For me this story is important because Rutan has repeatedly mocked NASA for spending so much money compared to him. He seems to fail to realize he was able to use decades of information and technology developed and paid for by NASA and other government means, including all the billions of dollars spent over the decades. Safety is one thing NASA has been criticized; yet for all it has achieved you might say the death toll is quite low. To me it seems a new stretch of freeway will cause more fatal accidents than has occurred in the history of NASA. Will Burt continue to brag about his shoestring budget now that 3 of his comrades have died while his operation has achieved very little in practical terms since 2004?

Lets examine what I will find in this CNN article. It is flanked on the right by a jumpy flash advertisement urging the reader to purchase a Nintendo Wii game immediately under the guise it will “train your brain”. So big deal I can try to ignore what is an ad to the side because it is not part of the content. You will see there is a tempting link to “watch the aftermath of the explosion” which I thought would be a way to glean what type of explosion and what the area was being used for. Instead of seeing what I expected I saw a fucking ape grinning and giggling while carrying a surfboard and a blond beach bum character looking at the chimp with raised eyebrow. I was so disgusted, enraged, insulted, and betrayed. This is CNN, a trusted name in news. Why would it be in CNNs interest to barrage me with unrelated material the very first moment I lay eyes on their YouTube knockoff video streamlined video feed? When I view the cable channel I can at least wait and come back after the commercials are over, but not the case with this. I could wait for 20 minutes, click on the video link, and the totally unrelated and insulting advertisement would play. It might be less than 20 seconds long, sure, but how long is the video stream content? I don’t know because I did not get that far. I tried clicking back on my web browser to get back to the article but when the page navigated back, the video feed floated in the article’s way. I had to go back to my home page to rid my senses of the drivel.

This is a huge commercial to content ratio that video providers are trying to push on YouTube like services. It is the same thing with AdultSwim’s website. A 2 minute ad every 5 or so minutes of content (AdultSwim of course owned by the same company as CNN: TimeWarner) That is a far higher ratio of commercial time than would be on television. Also the viewer is forced to watch it or abandon (or seriously disrupt) their computer experience completely to try and avoid it. The owners of the material might think: great the viewer is FORCED to pay attention and the advertisers will love that. Advertisements are a disgusting and immoral means of funding our news and television (or equivalent entertainment and information). Look at the BBC website. No ads. Watch TV in England, no ads. Watch TV in Quatar: no ads. Is anyone out there stupid enough to use advertisements as a trusted way to get information? Yes! The typical average user has no choice but to: the advertisements are IN THE WAY of the content (what people WANT to watch). Text ads like google have been so successful because they allow a moral way to combine content of a creator with minimal interference on the user experience. It seems like a step back doesn’t it when advertisements had to conform to strict expected standards? Advertisers have long relied on deceiving people or forcing people into watching content. It’s ugly, its immoral, and we put up with it? There should definitely be regulation on how advertisements are handled by video content providers on the internet else the providers will just continue to deceive and trick users the same way CNN did to me (and will do to you too).

Posted by admin as Effyou at 4:29 AM CEST

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I attended the Wordcamp 2007 in San Francisco. I was not really expecting to go until a month ago when my friend and employer suggested I go. There a few strange characters who spoke on the first day, and the second day was MANY strange characters. More on that later.

I found the cheapest most terrible hotel that Hotels.com would list information on. As luck would have it the instant I checked out laborers were removing the hotel furniture hastily out of the rooms, then smashing them to pieces on the side of the road. Danging television sets by the cord they would swing them into a rusty container that was probably supposed to be a dumpster. A Russian man wearing a black hooded sweatshirt (with the hood up while inside) who had been working the front desk informed me the hotel was recently purchased to some aggressively expanding art college in San Francisco and it was going to be a new dormitory. Those poor students. Late into every night constructions crews would operate the loudest and most rattling combinations of heavy equipment. It would then begin in the morning. Perhaps the new building across the street had to be finished in an extreme hurry. Rest in peace Olympic Hotel: Deceptively their website is still up and so is their listing on Hotels.com.

This was my first chance to experience and interact with actual real-life heroin addicts as well. Absurdly skinny blond females cuddling involuntarily next to crazy old men ranting nonsense in the soggy San Francisco morning. A more lucky schizophrenic woman I sat next to kept ordering fast food items from me on the Bart ride back to the airport.

I found if I wished help when I was about to kill myself I should be somewhere besides the Golden Gate Bridge because their emergency counseling phones are out of order.

Posted by admin as Required at 9:31 AM CEST

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Per settlement, the following transcript is required to appear prominently on RETRAN.COM
{conversation between “customer” and ReTran USA award winning service department}
Customer:
Is ReTran USA aware that CafePress products require that a vendor provide high resolution images so the logos do not look pixilated on the clothing?
Customer Service Dept:
If you don’t like them, just purchase one for full price some place else.
Customer:
No, I didn’t mean to… I was just suggesting!…
Customer Service Dept:
[interrupts customer] Maybe we’ll just intercept the package before it arrives so you wont be able to have your maternity shirt before your scheduled abortion.
Customer:
Please, I need it!

[Editor]:
That is right. If you submit proof that you or a close friend or mate is scheduled for an abortion, ReTran USA will supply you with a high-quality Maternity fitted shirt with a pixilated face on it from The ReTran USA Profit Website. Just email abortion@retran.com for details.
{remainder redacted}

Posted by admin as Required at 7:21 AM CEST

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