Malkin Blows Another One

And be sure to spend most of your day watching DumFux News - that way you're sure to stay dumb enough to spend most of your day watching DumFux News.

Seriously - what the fuck's wrong with these people?

Hit "Like" If You Don't Like This Shit

I dearly love to hate facebook - and with good reason I think.  Read the whole thing and learn something important about marketing in the age of digits.

From an editorial in a Canadian newspaper:

"Anyone else getting sick of these daft posts?" my "friend" Chardon asked. This was on Facebook a while back.

That's why I put "friend" in quotation marks. She was talking about an annoying trend: posts showing up on Facebook news feeds, saying something like, "Name a city without an 'R' in it. It's harder than it looks!"

It's not hard, of course. Ouagadougou, Vilnius, Montevideo all leap to mind. And Budge Budge in India. I'm sure there are others.

So what's the deal? Why go to the trouble of posting such an easy puzzle on Facebook?

Another "friend" replied, "Maybe someone is testing to see how many posts this rubbish can get."

And he was partly right. The rest of the explanation turns out to be creepy and may affect you even if you're among the dwindling minority of Canadians not on Facebook.

It gets especially creepy when the post is less benign and strikes an emotional chord:

"'Like' if you hate cancer."

"'Like' if you hate bullying."

--snip--

A Facebook page is created, with an appeal for readers to like, comment or share. The creators, who are working together to build these pages, share it among themselves. They all have big networks, so the pages instantly get into thousands of other people's news feeds.

When those people respond with a "like" or a share, then it reaches their friends. Suddenly, the thing has spread faster than a high-school rumour.

Then what? Then the people who started it, having quickly acquired tens of thousands of followers, sell the page. Now an advertiser has all those names and Facebook addresses. And that advertiser, who isn't allowed to phone you and whose flyers go straight to your recycling box, is sending you commercial messages on Facebook.

Not That Anybody Noticed

It seems like we're so stuck in "Yay Us" mode, that we can't even acknowledge reality.

And sometimes it's like we don't have the confidence (or maybe the courage?) we need to cut thru the politics to get at the truth.

If I can't trust The Red Team or The Blue Team not to make it about nothing but politics, how are we supposed to hold people in the Junior Bush Administration accountable for the horrors of this last decade?  And how do we demand that Obama's Admin stop whatever they're doing to continue those horrors - making it even harder to put an end to it all?

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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I dunno - but i think refusing to acknowledge the reality of how fucked up we let ourselves get is actually what keeps us stuck in "Yay Us" mode.  And it appears we'll be there for a while longer.

Careful What You Swallow

The Big Lie works wonders.  And just how big are the NRA's lies?

MoJo breaks it down:

Music

Mr Curtis Stigers - covering Dylan's Things Have Changed

Today's Featured Website

Just in time for all the bullshitty douchebaggery coming out of Washington, here's a great way to let your favorite Congress Critters know just how much you appreciate all their hard-workin'-kick-ass attempts to fuck us all with our pants on.

http://www.shitsenders.com/

hat tip = JG

I have no idea if it's real or not, but what a great idea.

Lotsa Layers

Peel this one like an onion:

Today In Good Government (updated)

And now, a message from the US Senate for the 90% of Americans who want sensible and reasonable regulations for gun ownership:

There is no soul and no honor in American politics anymore - not when the senate can't even scrape together enough courage to vote in favor of voting on the matter of some pretty simple rules about selling guns.

And way too many Press Poodles keep telling us "the measure failed".  The measure didn't fail; the measure was never voted on.

I'll have to take a day or two off, as I try to get the stench of this latest sorry episode out of my nostrils.

It occurs to me though, that some of these Coin-Operated Politicians pull this kinda shit on purpose.  If enough of us are disgusted enough by the way these assholes behave, then maybe enough of us will just throw up our hands and walk away - leaving them to do their shitty little deals without being seen by the people they're supposed to represent.  If I stay too close to this junk, I start feeling like I should be throwing furniture at people's heads.

I'll be back - and I'll be watching.

How We React

...to the event is what's important now.

From Bruce Schneier at The Atlantic:

As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it'd be easy to be scared. It'd be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something -- anything -- to keep us safe.

It'd be easy, but it'd be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators' hands -- and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don't have to be scared, and we're not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there's one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.

It's hard to do, because terrorism is designed precisely to scare people -- far out of proportion to its actual danger. A huge amount of research on fear and the brain teaches us that we exaggerate threats that are rare, spectacular, immediate, random -- in this case involving an innocent child -- senseless, horrific and graphic. Terrorism pushes all of our fear buttons, really hard, and we overreact.

Note to the terrorists/nutballs/wingnuts/whatever:

You're not going to make me close myself off from the world.  I won't be cowering in a Safe Room behind doors and windows sealed up with plastic sheets and duct tape.

I sure as hell don't get everything right every time, but I claim the right to keep trying; to go on stumbling forward; and you're not going get me to strangle myself in a security blanket just because you don't have enough hair on your sack to look me in the eye and call me out on the shit you don't agree with.

I live my life, and I do my little FreedomThing out in the open where everybody can see it.  You don't like it?  Well here I am, asshole.  Come and get me.

And oh yeah - almost forgot - there's 300 million of me, so fuck you.

The Kooch Fails Again

Virginia AG / Repub candidate for Gov, Ken (Kenny The Kooch) Cuccinelli has crashed and burned once again - this time in his attempt to get the Federal Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to consider his petition to affirm and reinstate Virginia's Crimes Against Nature laws.

The Fourth Circuit panel rejected Cuccinelli's petition unanimously.

Considering the fact that the SCOTUS decision in Lawrence vs Texas knocked all the stuffing out of every "anti-sodomy" law in every state, nobody but the uber-est of the uber-zealots thought he had any chance at all.  But there he was - our intrepid Culture Warrior King - flailing away; fighting to hold back the tides of change of the mid-20th-fucking-century.

Taxpayers put a fair bit of money in your pocket every month, Ken.  So we're gonna need you to do a little something more than runnin' in circles or just standin' there leanin' on your shovel.