Cronicles of Pointless People

Carrie Keagan Wants to Rock Nicki Minaj's "Backwards Mullet" Hair:

Carrie Keagan, host of VH1's Big Morning Buzz Live chats with Us Weekly about the history of hair in music. From Joan Jett's shag 'do, Cyndi Lauper's "highlighter yellow" hair color and Macy Grey's afro,

The Accidental Mullet

Esquire: My Magnificent New Hair

He explained that no one should just grow out his hair. You'll grow a mullet, or an Afro, or something you probably weren't looking to grow...

Ugh.

You Know them by their Blank Stare

Berlin's eternally dyspeptic "Wutbürgers." Their intellectual heft makes one nearly want to evacuate in situ.

Another Blog Reviewing Techhie Crap

Apps are ubiquitous. Apps are everywhere.

It's as if all blogs have to review things to look edgy and technically adept, so I'll apply those years in teh High School A/V club to good use.

Someone here needs to do a review of apps, and there ain't nobody but me, so here goes:

I track my bitches wit da Cellsnithes.

See? Just like that I entered that new-fangled techy world of Apps in a faux-ironical kind of way.

The Dreaded Google Street View now Confounding German Car Buyers

Oh, how very ironical. Volkswagen will be putting the dreaded privacy impuning Google Street View into Audi dash boards.

Forbes:

When Germany pushed back hard on Google Street View, Google complied with its conditions — blurring people’s faces and even going so far as to allow privacy-sensitive Germans to have their houses blurred out. (Not everyone in Germany was on board with the visual censorship, and some of those blurred houses wound up getting egged by pro-Googlers. Ironically, opting out made them even more visible.) But eventually Google got fed up with the restrictions, and abandoned Street View in Germany.

Talk about your Fahrvergnügen.

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2011\2-A

Go Green, Jennifer Parrish: The buzz about bees

"A diet primarily of bread and gruel may be our future if we do not address the honey bee crisis"...

Pedantry and malthusian excess, all in one mouthful. What more could you ask for?

Roman Polanski ! , Your Life is Calling !

From our bulging “Don’t Touch my Junk” file:

The research, soon to be published in international medical journal, Medical Education, describes - among others - a student with "no qualms" about performing an anal examination on a female patient because she didn't think the woman's consent was relevant.

They’re even lining up for it:

Another case outlined in the research describes a man who was subjected to rectal examinations from a "queue" of medical students after he was anaesthetised for surgery.

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2011\1-D

US investigation of Google Street View was a 'wasted summer'
Inquirer

DOCUMENTS HAVE SURFACED that shed some light on the lackadaisical attitude of US regulators towards last year's Google Street View privacy violations.

A senior attorney at the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) described the Google investigation as "a wasted summer" in a letter obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Centre through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The letter was written only a couple of days after the FTC decided to drop its inquiry into the matter. Many privacy advocates, especially in the UK and Europe, would be aghast at hearing the attorney describe the matter as "a time suck".

They need more time to abuse for-profit schools between naps, I guess.

Data protection organisations in the UK and Germany certainly have, unleashing considerable fury over the fact that a company that has so much data about us didn't have policies in place to stop this from happening.

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2010\12-E

Belief in Progress vs. Rational Uncertainty
Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

It can be found in New Age beliefs: the world is headed for a for a millennial age, and in techno-optimist futurism.

Others share an unwitting agreement with those others who tacitly think that ecological radicalism offers a set of virtues around which a body of faith can be built around.

While some transhumanists still press for technological innovation on all fronts and oppose all regulation, others are focusing on reducing the civilization-ending potentials of asteroid strikes, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology.

With "Hype" Placed in Scare Quotes

What would we do without an 'action plan'?

The European Commission has published a new action plan intended to shed light on reports of declining honey-bee populations across Europe, key pollinators for many of the bloc's important crop species.

At the same time, one the Europe's top scientists in the field has warned against mass hysteria, pointing out that most species have experienced epidemics at one stage or another over previous centuries, ultimately with little long-term effect.

Steal His Book – If he ever Publishes One

Gutmenschtum cause requires flexibility. Flexibility, that is, with the reality of any situation over which you decide to become as theatrically outraged as those who tell you that you should (if you want to remain a good little Gutmensch.)


Sign and Sight, the product of near-monopoly mega-publisher Bertelsmann (AKA the Death Star of European gutmenschliche non-diversity of thought and opinion), takes up the matter in their unsalable digital form over a tempest in a teapot governing Argentine copyright law. Apparently it’s draconian because at it’s heart, it doesn’t exempt professional academic philosophers from stealing others’ copywritten work.

The article 17º states that "Every author or inventor is the exclusive owner of his work, invention or discovery, for the term granted by law".
Juan Bautista Alberdi intended for the copyright term to be indefinite, but during the writing of the Constitution it was decided to give a time limit, as done in Chile and the United States.

Pretty damn typical, and a good friend of authors who want to defend themselves from theft of their work by those evil corporate publishers, not to mention comforting the publishers enough to believe that if they print something, some ass isn’t going to turn around and give it away. It’s hard to see any publisher committing to print ANYTHING without that protection.

Alas, enter the outraged:

in 2009, something happened that no one in their right mind would have believed possible: the Argentinian Book Chamber filed charges against a university professor who was running a number of websites on philosophy. Among other things, these featured unpublished or unavailable texts by Derrida, Heidegger and Nietzsche.

Because laws are for vanity, I guess – not to be enforced!

[in 1913] Clemenceau learned that one of his theater plays was being played without authorization. After a dispute about the topic, the first copyright law was enacted in 1913.

The interview’s hero, Horatio Patel further bumbles:

In my naivete I had assumed that the existence of such a wonderful medium for sharing texts would mean that within a decade, the majority if not the entirety of philosophical writ could be available online. Which would mean that everyone would have a complete library in their homes, making it unnecessary to travel or wait, and that the 'books' could be leant to thousands simultaneously, and would be easy to locate. And finally I thought of philosophy magazines which are published once a year at most, and then only in editions of 50, which is barely enough to supply the specialist libraries. This would all change, I thought. Everything that had ever been or would ever be produced, could be published online. This was utterly fantastic, I thought.

Which in the case of copywritten work, can easily made spontaneous with online sales and e-book readers. However, that’s not good enough. The author or rights-holder must never be compensated for their work, even if they want to.

The source of his horror?

Horacio Potel's name was picked up by the European, Asian and US media. The case of the Argentinian professor who was taken to court for putting philosophical texts online, with no intent to make a profit, made it painfully clear that if everyone breaks the law, anyone could be prosecuted.

Picked up, because the idea of defending the hero of all great truths from intellectual repression couldn’t matter more based on the logic that the man wasn’t making a profit. He was giving away other people’s work without their permission, but that’s okay, because there wasn’t any profit involved in his giving something away.

Tell you what... I feel generous. I’m going to give you Potel’s shoes. How does that sound. There’s no profit involved, so we can all feel good and warm inside! Property is theft, Pal!

Doesn’t Horacio Potel realize that if the rights-holders of Derrida, Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s work wanted their otherwise unavailable writings released for free, they would do it? Even Abbie Hoffman didn’t surrender his rights to “Steal this Book”. Even he understood that it wasn’t yours’ to give away.

News Digest of the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2010\10-E

One thing a fake crisis can't bear is common sense and apathy. Case in point: the "broadband crisis"

At the Progress and Freedom Foundation blog, Adam Thierer notes that a recent Pew Center poll shows a slight majority of Americans don't think supplying broadband should be a big government priority.

The anatomy of this "crisis"? It all starts with satisfied people!

there might be a number of reasons that respondents downplayed the importance of government actions to spur broadband diffusion, including that: (1) many folks are quite content with the Internet service they get today; (2) others might get their online fix at work or other places and not feel the need for it at home; and (3) some may not care two bits (excuse the pun) about broadband at all. More generally, I noted that, with all the other issues out there to consider, broadband policy just isn't that important to most folks in the larger scheme of things....

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2010\10-D

Czech Republic blocks Google's data mapping feature
Seer Press

Google Street View provides panoramic photos of many streets in cities around the world. Privacy groups are concerned that their activities which they do.


Google Street View: No more privacy for penguins as Antarctica gets mapped
The Guardian

Privacy was not nearly as contentious in the five US cities – New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver.

”Caring mayor wants Roma register”

Why does their “caring” sound so much like a cross between pandering and fascism?

“Ethnic registration for Roma”, headlines De Volkskrant. Social democratic mayor Cor de Vos of Nieuwegein, a town in the central Holland, says that councils with the largest Roma populations should keep an ethnic register of the community. “We are dealing with a group of people which is not integrated in Dutch society,” he declared.

If that’s the case, why don’t they “register” gays and anyone who might haver ever practiced Islam?

“They need to be helped, for their own sake and that of their neighbourhood. But we can’t do that without knowing their situation.” Last Wednesday it was revealed that the city council of Ede has been holding police, child welfare and justice department files on the Roma since 1978. The council apologised but also said: “The law isn't in step with the issues.

And of course that was bad, and wrong. Sooooo in the interest of “caring”, there will be a lot more of it.

What next? Tattoos to show you “care”?

BSP8R, Private Dipstick

The passive-aggressive “pacifist”left has lost its’ hobgoblin and its’ imaginary foil: the German CDU-led government has decided to end conscription and rely on a an all-volunteer force. Not only does thin out the ranks of the thoughtless buffoons that a soldier in harm’s way need no longer depend on with his life, takes the Mickey out of the endless blathering rhetoric of the German far left’s argument that “our children” (whom they can’t seem to stop hating,) are cannon fodder for whatever war that comes along.

While compulsory service will be abolished, the alternative Berlin daily wonders aloud if this is truly "a triumph for the pacifist left". Its answer is a firm nein: "On the contrary, when Germany is called on to take part in a war more than 1,000 km away, (the army) doesn't need a horde of fresh recruits, but rather teams of specialists in security and modern weaponry".

Funny that with all the “hey, I play fist-person-shooter games too” talk of robocops with sooper-dooper death ray weapons, that they can’t even imagine what the social dynamics of an all-volunteer force are.

Never mind the fact that their deployments since 1945 have been limited to police duty in the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, unless you count the DDR’s “advisors” to the Sandinistas and to South Yemen.



For two generations, the only group of people that have benefitted more from the spilling of other people’s blood and treasure have been Kim Jong Il’s cronies, and Swiss bankers. It’s time that the war-obsessed anti-defense suicide cult in Germany did the halts Maul! and get real for once.

In the mean time, Die Welt reports that:

"The nostalgic invocation of the usefulness of conscription could no longer stand up to the facts: When fewer than 7,000 out of a total of 250,000 soldiers are available for missions abroad; when just 14 percent of young men are drafted; when even the majority within the military itself supports reform -- in such a case, renewal is unavoidable."

(Translation by Spiegel Online.) The protesting types are angry armies even exist, so it comes as no surprise that they wouldn’t “support the (conscription of) troops” so long as they remain in an ineffectual state. Some Conservatives, on the other hand, have always seen it as a means toward social cohesion, and to keep otherwise feral youts under control long enough for them to get a grip on their warm and charming personalities. Either way, they cannot afford it, or are unwilling to go on as they have in an embarrassingly low state of readiness.

Elephant! The Light Musical Comedy!

Compare and Contrast:

David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and implausible Basque terrorists They can't be serious, because they aren't, even though they're basically vanquished.



0 ourbursts of false conciousness