The next time you want to develop a roll of film at your "local" nationwide drug store chain, think twice.

It turns out that that Walgreen's, CVS, Eckerds and Rite-Aid have policies that give their under-paid and under-qualified counter monkeys sole discretion over which of your photos are obscene. In the case linked to here, a Walgreen's employee was offended by a picture of a man with a nipple ring, so the employee destroyed the photo and the negative. Had somebody else been on duty that day, the picture may not have raised an eyebrow. It's a complete crapshoot, with an emphasis on the crap.

People aren't bringing their film in for approval; they're bringing it in for developing. Not editing. Not censoring. De-vel-op-ing. If my pictures offend the staff, their options should be limited to either a) giving me at least my negatives and asking me not to come back again, or preferably, b) fucking off and doing their fucking job without all the fucking moralizing and fretting about my immortal soul.

So who's behind this nonsensical crap? Who but the very inventors of nonsensical crap themselves, the American Family Association. If you're unfamiliar with them, they are this country's premier group of hippocritical, sanctimonious, racist, homophobic, woman-hating dog-kickers. Which wouldn't be such a problem if they weren't so well-funded and politically powerful.

Not about to be outdone in the sanctimony department, Wal-Mart goes a step further. If any of your pictures show any genitalia at all, they call the police. Even if it's your 1-year-old playing with Spongebob in the tub? Yup. They call the fucking police on you. Always. At Wal-Mart, they're rolling back prices, and civil liberties.

Thanks to Stay Free! for the heads-up on this.
clevescene.com | Nipple-Free Zone | 2004-04-14

I've been a slacker lately, so (instead of paying my bills) I decided to do a little poking around for something stimulating to blog about. My goal was to locate a worthwhile, ongoing discussion about an interesting topic, so that discerning Hateful Things visitors might be encouraged to join in.

Trying to take the high ground, intellectually speaking, I Googled the string "george w. bush eats babies." To my surprise, there were no direct hits. I did, however, come across this little press release about Bush winning the World Stupidity Award, a two-year old honor inspired by the documentary film Stupidity by Albert Nerenberg, the founder of Trailervision (where you'll find, along with parodic movie trailers, a link to the Stupidity: The Movie website, which, so poorly designed is it, you should visit only if you enjoy high irony).

Continuing on, I decided to try being a little more positive and serious (hard to do simultaneously when you're bitter and sarcastic by nature), and my effort was rewarded when I found MIT's Tech Policy discussion board.

More than ready to dig in to a tasty meal of meaty conversation, I picked a link called "Adam's Reading List," thinking I might find something good. Adam has some interesting books lined up, including Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's Linked, which is near the top of my own waiting pile. His list also included Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston's Perfectly Legal: The Secret Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super-Rich -- and Cheat Everybody Else. I'd heard an interview with Johnson on my local NPR station, and he seemed like a wonderfully sincere man whose research was deep and fascinating. Still looking for that engaged and enlightening conversation, I decided to check out the discussion board for that book, and was (no doubt, due to my naivety) surprised to find that the commentary consisted exclusively of spam, with a significant emphasis on hot slut wives and various subsets of hot and/or wild nude teen girls.

Talk about stupidity. If nothing else, this proves that Barabasi's on to something. I'm sorry to say, dear readers, that I tried to find you an interesting conversation, but all I found was the internet, masturbating.

It was discovered in 1741 by the Russian scientist George Stellar. A gigantic relative of the manatee, these docile creatures could reach 26 feet long and weigh over 7000 pounds.

Twenty-seven years later, humans killed the last one of them. Stellar was the only scientist to ever see one alive.
AMIQ: Stellar's Sea Cow

On a related note, New Zealand's moa was hunted to extinction several hundred years ago. If you've never seen a picture of these amazing and terrifying birds, here's your chance.

In this game, you're God, and your creations (stick people, cows and sheep) have angered you. Solution? Shoot lightning at them!

It's good to be God.
Wrath

Your average slob doesn't really know a whole lot about how "intellectual property" works. Some people think they know something about it, but most of them are wrong. So I'm going to explain to you, in broad strokes, the intricacies of modern intellectual property law.

It's helpful to picture copyright and trademark law as a large, splintery two-by-four board with a rusty 6-inch nail sticking out of it. This board is wielded by powerful, monied interests to strike ordinary people like you and I in the face so that we learn to SHUT THE FUCK UP and only say things that don't offend the wealthy and the strong.

But perhaps that's too strong a metaphor.

Instead, let's picture intellectual property laws as the bars out of which powerful media and manufacturing companies can build an impenetrable cage. And in that cage, they can place the very culture that you and I helped create, the very culture that we live in and through which we express ourselves every day. And with our culture safely locked away in this cage, they can then charge us money to look at it, and we'll thank them for the privilege.

It reminds me of something a smart lady once said: "They cut down all the trees and put 'em in a tree museum. Then they charged all the people a dollar and a half just to see 'em."

[Irony Alert: because I didn't properly credit that last paragraph, I probably violated copyright just then...]

My point is, copyright has been highjacked by powerful commercial interests so that today, instead of being a series of protections aimed at fostering creativity, it's a way of placing ideas in jars and hiding them away from view. It's not only wrong, it's impossible. You can't put a leash on an idea any more than you can catch a person's soul in a cookie tin. Sadly, that won't stop The Powerful from wreaking havoc trying to do just that.

So today, while you still can, I invite you to visit a little art project called "Illegal Art."
illegal-art.org :: a project of Stay Free! magazine

Here are some other copyright resources. Edu-ma-cate yourself!
A Timeline of U.S. Copyright
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
Lawrence Lessig, the Big Voice of copyright common sense
Creative Commons, a sensible and more responsible form of liscensing

OK, Rhu. I'll respond to your previous post, despite the rather ham-fisted way you set the bait.

You're correct when you say that employers' monitoring of employees' email is legal, at least in most situations. But it certainly isn't right. In fact, it's wasteful, dangerous, and counter-productive.

It's wasteful, in that an employer needs to spend resources (human, financial and technological) to monitor email. What is the perceived threat that a corporation is reacting against? Spouses sending each other grocery lists? I submit that most monitoring of email is the result of fetishistic voyeurism on the part of the employer, rather than some legitimate business interest.

It's dangerous, because of liability. If an employee IS using company email to engage in criminal acts, such as terrorism or kiddie porn, the employer randomly monitoring email has now become an accomplice to the crime.

It's like this: the phone company isn't liable when somebody uses a phone to plot a crime, because the phone company doesn't monitor people's phone calls. By the same token, FedEx isn't liable when somebody ships blueprints for a nuclear bomb via their service, because FedEx won't inspect packages without probable cause. But airlines ARE being held liable for lax security leading up to Sept. 11, because they DID search passengers and therefore, they SHOULD HAVE CAUGHT the jerkoffs boarding their planes with box-cutters. This "right" to monitor email is really a gigantic white elephant. Employers would be wise to ask congress for a law forbidding them from monitoring employees' email, thereby absolving them of culpability in dicey situations.

Lastly, monitoring employees' email is counter-productive. A company that spends thousands of dollars on insulting and ill-conceived "team-building" excursions can't then send those same employees back to the office to be monitored like criminals. Even those employees that are too dumb to know what irony is will get the message that, in the end, they're inmates, not team members.

I work for a company that has told us that our phones will not be tapped, and our emails will not be monitored. They recognize that we make personal calls, and that we send personal emails. However, we're judged by how well we perform our duties. Giving us the freedom to speak costs my company nothing, and improves morale. It's a no-brainer.

Here's a better-than-average bit of animation I thought was pretty funny. I now command you to watch it as well.
JibJab

Never mind gambling in Rick's Cafe, did you hear that 43% of large employers monitor out-going email? Well, here's a shocker, I think that is perfectly legal and right. They own the damn things (mail servers), just as they own the phones so why shouldn't they? [Roxy?]

We, the righteous folks, can't get dragged into these silly illogical fights when there are far more troubling issues at hand, like the US Court of Appeals decision that ISPs have the right to monitor our mail, or the root cause of this and many issues (see Roxy post "Fear and Loathing in Congress"), that our government is trapped in a two-party system that is to democracy as fucking is to chastity.

Why can't Marty get his bill in? Because he is in the minority.

Why should we shed a tear over the retirement of the bastard Zell Miller? Because he was a Democrat who will be replaced by a republican, giving one more seat to Them.

How do we change this? Not by voting for Ralph; not by not voting or by posting whiney profanity-filled/profundity-less blogs. I don't know... you tell me.
Resistance is Futile. Your e-Mail Is Being Watched.

It brings me down to keep linking to this, but I feel I need to. The magnitude of this betrayal is so immense, and its consequences so catastrophic, everybody needs to stay informed about this.

Again, I'd like to thank BoingBoing.net for staying on top of this story. I've always given mad props to BB as the best blog on the planet, and I urge those of you who still haven't visited them to try them out.

Unfortunately, it falls to us, the electorate, to make sure that everyone involved in the Abu Ghraib debacle, everyone who knew about it, and everyone who should have known about it is punished so severely that future generations will tell horror stories about their fates. The guilty need to wail in utter despair as their futures are destroyed, their dreams are eradicated, and their will to live is extinguished like a match in a piss puddle.

That accountability begins November 4, people. If we can't send them all to jail, we can at least send them back to Texas. That's how we start washing the blood off our own hands. That's how we start restoring our own dignity. And that's only a start.
Boing Boing: Evidence for Hersh's claims of child sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib?

OK, this site isn't in english, but we have a fairly intelligent readership, so I'm sure you'll figure it out.*

Here's the general idea: You press the start button, and then use your mouse to try and keep the drunken guy from falling over. Hilarity ensues when, despite your best efforts, he falls over anyway! LAFF!

Thanks to HT pal David Mee for the high-brow heads up.
Die Wagenschenke - Das Partyzelt am Albanifest in Winterthur.

*intelligence estimates are based purely on idle fantasy, without so much as a whiff of science.

Punk anarchist and treasonous shockmistress Linda Ronstadt had her 58-year-old, rabble-rousing ass thrown out of the Aladdin Casino recently, after she sparked a near riot. It seems her lounge act included a cover of the Eagles' insipid Desperado, which she dedicated to - GASP! - Michael Moore.

After the crowd began tearing down posters and storming the box office demanding refunds, she and her leftist guerrilla sympathies were unceremoniously escorted from the building, thereby making the world safe once again for right-wing zealots to plunder without remorse. Whew.
CNN.com - Casino ejects Ronstadt over 'Fahrenheit' praise

Regular readers may have noticed that I make a lot of links to a site called Wikipedia. For those that aren't familiar with it, it's a beautiful thing.

It's an encyclopedia that's constantly being written by the people who use it. It's a gigantic, decentralized, distributed, collaborative experiment in writing a reference work. It's way cool, and it's way free, although a voluntary contribution of, like, $5 wouldn't break you, would it?

God bless the internet!
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Baltimore area has always been known for it's bizarre and frightening residents (John Waters, for instance.), but this one takes the cake. There's a cryptid on the loose down there, and it's atypically brazen in the way it struts about in the clear light of day.



Whether it's a bona fide freak of nature or just a dog with a bad haircut remains to be seen, but for now, it's giving a lot of people the creeps.
nbc13.com - Mystery Creature Lurks In Central Maryland

...I pee myself every time I go to his web site. So strap on your adult diapers and take a look.
klockwerks - Unique Timepieces

The carbofascist cult that dictates what Americans can eat has hit a new low. Our beloved Froot Loops and Frosted Flakes now have one-third less sugar! Apparently, it's never too early for your kids to embark on a lifestyle of obsessive fad dieting.

The next step in the evolution: Beef Loops and Frosted Flakes of Bacon.
KELLOGG'S: 1/3 Less Sugar

America's Founding Fathers, despite their hit-and-miss wisdom, really knocked one out of the park with their constitutional addendum commonly known as the First Amendment:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

It's unclear why they needed to come up with five seperate rights and then cram them all into one sentence, but nevertheless, it works.

The First Amendment is usually tossed about in the context of freedom of religion, speech and the press. The last part, about petitioning the government for a redress of grievances, isn't much of a headline-grabber. But the fourth right - the one allowing us to peaceably assemble - that's the unsung hero. And while letting people get together hasn't always worked out for the best, it's the notion that lays the foundation for everything from picket lines to political parties.

Of course, even the high-falutin' ideals of the founding fathers are subject to the Law of Unintended Consequences.

The Shakers were a religious sect that started in the 18th century, had its heyday in the 19th century, and sort of fizzled out in the 20th century, though that's a pretty respectable run, considering they forbad procreation. Their architecture and their furniture had (and still has) a major influence on American design. And they gave us some very practical inventions, too, like the screw propeller and clothespins. The Shakers used their right to peaceably assemble when they formed communities of the gender-segregated and sexually-repressed faithful throughout the Northeast.

The tradition of kooks banding together for a common purpose continues to this very day, with movements such as The Free State Project, which aims to pack the state of New Hampshire with enough Libertarians to field and elect candidates. Once this political critical mass is achieved, it's unclear whether they'll try to secede from the U.S., spread their revolt to other states, or just collapse under the weight of their own ill-conceived and dangerous policies.

But the real reason I'm on this rant today is because of a group called Christian Exodus, which has just recently come to my attention. Their goal?

"The time has come for Christians to withdraw our consent from the current federal government and re-establish the sovereign nation of South Carolina upon the Christian principles once so predominant in America."

Further, they promise "the return of constitutionally limited government," which is ironic, since limiting the intrusion of government is probably the precise opposite of what they want.

Suddenly, New Hampshire doesn't look like such a bad idea.

The Exodus folks have a very detailed timetable for their coup d'etat, one which culminates in 2016 with their secession from the United States. A large part of me wants to flip them the bird and stamp a muddy a footprint on their collective ass as they go, but another part would rather see them take Guam or the Marshall Islands, or some other little spit of land we wouldn't miss so much. Perhaps Delaware.

I feel that somebody down in South Carolina should remind these guys that, in the past, secession as a means of political problem-solving has gone over like a fart in church.
Christian Exodus

My personal congresscritter is Marty Meehan (D - MA, 5th District). I think he does a pretty good job, overall, and I expect he'll be running for John Kerry's senate seat when Team Democrat storms the White House this Fall.

Marty has introduced a bill, the bitterly ironic "Democracy In Congress Act Of 2004," which would temper some of the more shameless tyranny we've witnessed from the Republicans that control Congress. (rabid lefty endorsement here.) You don't need a degree in political science to realize that this bill is never going to see the light of day. Yet one of its provisions intrigues me.

One of the reforms included would require that a bill be publicly available online for at least 3 days prior to coming up for a vote. I ask you: Is that not perfectly reasonable? Why aren't we already doing that? What argument could you possibly make against such a requirement?

The reason Congress doesn't do it, and the reason they will continue to not do it, is simple. They fear us, and they fear democracy. Yeah, I know. It sounds like The Big Conspiracy, but it's true. Whether it's Republicans or Democrats or General Motors or Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the primary instinct of a powerful organization is self-preservation.

Posting bills online before a vote translates into a loss of power. Many bills pass because of rushed votes and sleepy legislators who haven't even read the bill on the floor. Can you imagine what might happen if the press and the public had 3 days to read things? The party running the vote gets exposed to sunlight, widely regarded as a good disinfectant. (Napalm is better.)

So, Congress will post bills online when the (perceived) consequences of NOT doing it outweigh the (perceived) consequences of doing it. In other words, when people get angry and demand it. In other other words, when the polls and strategists tell them to.

In other other other words, it's all politics. Here's Marty talking up his bill in The Boston Globe:
Curbing GOP's iron rule in Congress

Remember the good ol' days, when national security just meant opening fire on unarmed college students?

Those were simpler times. The soul-crushing, despair-inducing, rage-making story I'm about to link to is entitled: "Hersh: children raped at Abu Ghraib, Pentagon has videos." I'm telling you, nobody does blooper reels like the U.S. Armed Forces!

The "Hersh" being referred to is none other than The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh. Here's a sample:

"Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."

Thanks to BoingBoing for putting this story in front of me, and thanks to the people that brought it to BoingBoing's attention. And, as always, a special thanks to our president, George W. Bush, for disgracing the presidency, destroying our global credibility and making the world a more dangerous place.
Spreading Democracy, One Ravaged Anus At a Time

Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 might not have told us anything we didn't already know, but it did remind us about the power of images. It reminds us to question what we're seeing (even at the risk of having us turn that same critical eye on Moore's own work) and, perhaps more importantly, it gives us pause to think about what we're not seeing. When was the last time you saw footage of the protests at Bush's inauguration? Did you EVER see it? (If you're looking for a reminder, check out this 13-minute documentary filmed by Nathan Bramble at the 2001 inauguration or, if you're not already depressed, look at this very short clip of protest footage as an object lesson in why this material is so scarce.) In my world, all of this would be as overexposed as the Zapruder film. (While we're at it, check out this press release from the non-profit organization Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.)

If you're curious about how the media can suffer from this kind of collective hysterical blindness, scratch the itch by looking for these two upcoming films:
Outfoxed: Rupert Murdock's War on Journalism
and
Orwell Rolls in His Grave.

Besides exposing Michael Moore to a spate of mild name-calling by the media (offset by the buckets of cash he's hauling in) and confirming his ripeness as a candidate for Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Fahrenheit 9/11 may have helped, by virtue of its commercial success, to pry open the doors of film venues for more documentaries -- especially, like the two above, ones about media whoring and deceit, which particularly enrage and delight me.

Note to the DNC: if you're looking for a ruthless media consultant who's willing to leverage the power of images in the name of the common defense, post a comment to this blog, and I'll get back to you. Just look what that Mel Gibson movie did for Jesus!

There's a reason that the law recognizes the sanctity of certain relationships, and refers to them as "privileged." It's essential that people are free to be honest with, for example, their spouses, or their lawyers, or their DOCTORS. These sorts of privileged communications can't be used against us by the government. If it was any other way, well, it just wouldn't work out in our collective best interest.

So, when this guy tells his doctor he drinks more than a 6-pack a day, and the doctor reports him to the state, and the state revokes his driver's license, we have witnessed a fundamental and unforgivable breach of trust. HIS DOCTOR RATTED HIM OUT! And some idiotic state law says it's OK!

This whole thing stinks on ice, and it's situations like this that merit the phrase "chilling effect." Yuck.
CNN - Man loses license after telling doctor about drinking

Though a more organized DoD doesn't exactly jive with my whole "Make love, not war" theme, I should like to see the massive waste reduced a bit until we can imagine a world with no countries. Gregory Kutz, author of a scathing GAO report on the DoD, suggests that easily 5% of the DoD budget could/should be saved through basic management principles. That's $20 billion, or 4 times the 2005 federal education budget.
Next-gen Data Center Forum

What we have here are famous movies, edited down to 30 seconds, and re-enacted by bunnies. They're strange and funny.

On a deeper level, it's an interesting commentary on the power of iconic cultural imagery that a movie like "The Shining" can be retold in 30 seconds by bunnies and still make sense to us. Part of what makes cinema so powerful is that it's both a shared experience and a non-interactive one. For some of their punch, these little mini-movies rely on the fact that the camera angles, slow pans and fade-outs that I saw in the original movie were exactly the same ones you saw when you watched the movie. The point-of-view is immutable, which differentiates film from live performances, where front-row-right and balcony-left do experience different perspectives on the action. And the imagery in film is overt, which differentiates it from books, where descriptions on a page lead to very subjective pictures in the reader's mind.

So, whether the Angry Alien people are aware of it or not, they're skillfully exploiting the medium of film, with its unique set of strengths and limitations, to entertain us and - just perhaps - educate us about the culture that we live in.

Two Dog Night teaches film from time to time, and may reserve the right to tell me I'm full of shit.

Thanks to HT friend Ed for the heads up about this link.
Angry Alien Productions

"The Corporation" is a documentary about - you guessed it - corporations. Specifically, it's about why treating corporations as people is such a very bad idea. The main problem, for me, is that corporations aren't merely humans; they're superhuman elites, not bound by the mortal coil, incapable of going to jail, and unfettered by conscience or emotion.

(*cough* BORG! *cough*)

Don't expect the same wide release that F9/11 got, but if you live near a major city, you might get a glimpse of it. Otherwise, watch for it on DVD sometime.

Here's a link to the trailer. Like my previous post, QuickTime is required. If you don't have it, get it for free, and quit using blurry electronic flipbooks like Real or - God forbid! - Windows Media. You'll go blind.
Coffee and Cigarettes - Quicktime Trailers

So... I went to see "Fahrenheit 9/11" last night. Woo! The executive summary:

--> Cast of thousands
--> Lots of action, intrigue
--> Bush's latex mask peeled back to reveal evil cyborg beneath
--> Moore's clothes still distractingly ill-fitting

If you haven't seen it, you really should. Honestly. Go.

But before the movie started, we were, of course, pounded with a half-dozen previews of upcoming flicks. One of them was for "Open Water," the purportedly true story of 2 divers who get stranded in the middle of the ocean when their party boat heads back to port without them.

What ensues is a lot of crying, and being courageous, and shrieking when something brushes up against one's leg. My co-blogger 2 Dog Night wrapped the whole thing up with a bow when she declared it to be "The Blair Fish Project."

Here's the trailer. (requires QuickTime.)
Open Water

Average rant but neat site. Got to love a mag that mocks recently dead presidents while celebrating game show hosts.
PETE COORS: PUTTING THE PARTAY IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY - tastes like chicken

Who's protecting the web's pooches? Just say No to Anthropomorphism.
Virtual Private Networking, VPN. Secure Virtual Private Networking.

It's the morning after: time to pick up the hundred-odd tons of trash that were Yankee Doodled all over the Esplanade in Boston. I'll do my share by picking up some of the 12 zillion chicken bones that were strewn all over Lowell's own Vandenberg Esplanade in the name of God and Country. The sheer volume of celebration doesn't seem to jibe with these survey results from the First Amendment Center; read around that site and then ask yourself (or better yet, your neighbor) what the hell all that noise last night was about, anyhow. Then, to cheer yourself up a tiny little bit, poke around at The Gadflyer.

Happy 4th of July, all. I was hoping to celebrate by following up Roxy's early disaster postings (below) with a link to some wonderful fireworks disaster sites, but I was distracted by Blog Gently's discourse and eventually made my way to this patriotism-inspiring link instead. You may now return to your regularly scheduled celebration.

This is my nomination for the Best Bush Bash. I invite you to try and top it but the soaring language, " ...American people -- proud heirs of a bold revolutionary spirit now marking the 228th anniversary of its fiery eruption into the world...", the alliteration [personal favorite] "...wiggle room for White House weasel-worders ...", and the joyous vitriol "... its once-proud people scrambling for crumbs in the fetid mud of Bush's Murder Incorporated ..." will not be easily bested.
Global Eye

"If it's not here, it doesn't exist," claims the tagline at this site. You can imagine my surprise, then, when I found that the "KnowledgeBase" at the core of this compendium lists exactly 15 entries. I had previously assumed that the sum total of everything known to man would require a much more elaborate index.

The site is an attempt to explain everything in the world, in non-technical and accessible language. This is done mainly by omitting the confusing stuff and making things up on-the-fly. Here's an excerpt from the entry on Jane Austen:

"Jane Millington Austen was born in a public house in Winchester, in 1775. Her father was the Rev. Steven Austen; her mother, Margaret Trapster, worked in a cigarette-stuffing factory. Despite their poor situation and strict Christian background, the Austens obviously went at it hammer and tongs, for they had seven further children in as many years."

I feel smarter already. For further elightenment, click the link.
All World Knowledge: Educational articles on everything and more

With the election coming, it simply can't hurt to take a refresher course at Evil Science University. Dr. Vulture's site warrants a visit, though some sections are stronger than others, simply on the strength of its slogan: "Evil Deserves more than an Educated Guess."
Dr. Vulture's Laboratory of Evil Science