This entire post has been stolen verbatim from jonquil, because I just couldn't come up with my own words for something this, uh, I can't come up with the right word here. Everything past the dividing line are jonquil's words, not mine. You can join in a discussion on the original post, here.

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(via the Consumerist) Toyota has been running a promotion in which you sign up your friends to receive E-mail that will "freak them out."

Seriously.

"YourOtherYou is a unique interactive experience enabling consumers to play extravagant pranks. Simply input a little info about a friend (phone, address, etc.) and we'll then use it, without their knowledge, to freak them out through a series of dynamically personalized phone calls, texts, emails and videos. First, one of five virtual lunatics will contact your friend. They will seem to know them intimately, and tell them that they are driving cross-country to visit. It all goes downhill from there. The Matrix integrates seamlessly into the experience and you can follow the progress of your prank in real-time online. Each piece of the campaign assures that the experience is as Google-proof as possible."

Contemplate that for a moment. Also contemplate what sort of 'friend' would sign you up.

Amber Duick is suing. You see, her interactive E-mails said "a fictitious man called Sebastian Bowler, from England, who said he was on the run from the law, knew her and where she lived, and was coming to her home to hide from the police.". Not surprisingly, she freaked out; "she had difficulty eating, sleeping and going to work during March and April of last year."

Tepper, Duick's attorney, said he discussed the campaign with Toyota's attorneys earlier this year, and they said the "opting in" Harp referred to was done when Duick's friend e-mailed her a "personality test" that contained a link to an "indecipherable" written statement that Toyota used as a form of consent from Duick.

Tepper, said that during those legal negotiations, Toyota's lawyers claimed Duick signed the written legal agreement, which they said amounts to "informed written consent."

(A) This is evil. (B) Why does Toyota think this is a good way to promote the brand name? (C) I hope she takes them for their back teeth, their gonads, and the entire fee they paid to the advertising agency who dreamed this up.

Um. roadriverrail points out, via the community the_recession, that Sweden has just set new interest rates.

New negative interest rates.

They're charging people money for the privilege of keeping their money in the banks.

This happens in a week. Original data here. The money(!!) quote is: The deposit rate is at the same time cut to -0.25 per cent and the lending rate to 0.75 per cent.

Some commentary here.

Remember to fill up your car when you're low on gas. Especially when you're robbing a conveniently located gas station.

Shades of the Wild West, except that even Wyatt Earp didn't let people carry guns in bars.

Mississippi's still fattest but Alabama is closing in:
Mississippi's still king of cellulite, but an ominous tide is rolling toward the Medicare doctors in neighboring Alabama: obese baby boomers.

On the outskirts of Lusaka, Zambia, next year's crop of bicycles is being watered by Benjamin Banda. From bush to bike: a bamboo revolution

Ancient DNA used to map extinct bird's colors

NPR plays obscene word games. The issue is whether or not waterboarding is torture; their answer is that, despite the fact that people have been convicted of war crimes for doing it, because the people who ordered it said it wasn't torture, that raises a reasonable doubt.

[...]I believe that it is not the role of journalists to take sides or to characterize things.
[...]
But no matter how many distinguished groups -- the International Red Cross, the U.N. High Commissioners -- say waterboarding is torture, there are responsible people who say it is not. Former President Bush, former Vice President Cheney, their staff and their supporters obviously believed that waterboarding terrorism suspects was necessary to protect the nation's security.

One can disagree strongly with those beliefs and their actions. But they are due some respect for their views, which are shared by a portion of the American public. So, it is not an open-and-shut case that everyone believes waterboarding to be torture. Many in NPR's audience obviously believe it is, but others do not.

Christ on a motorcycle. I don't know how to respond to that bit of bullshit.

Man demands sex before returning lost dog
Los Angeles County prosecutors allege that a convicted sex offender tried to extort a teenager by demanding cash or sex for the return of her lost dog.

Iowa fair to have butter statue of Michael Jackson

Boy steals from ambulance as paramedics are treating his mother
A boy was arrested over the weekend on charges of stealing from an ambulance while paramedics were treating his mother.

Frankly, I might have done the same thing if someone had lit up in my house after being asked not to, even if that person *did* live here too: Man drenches wife with hose for smoking
Authorities said a man has been charged with domestic battery after he drenched his wife with a garden hose and elbowed her for smoking in the house.

Protection sought again for giant, spitting worms
Yes, you read that right. Protection FOR, not protection FROM.

Western Michigan University student William K. Bradley was sentenced for larceny in a building. He stole a computer. From the Kalamazoo County jail. Where he already was serving a sentence in a different case.

Chosen for Public Information Value: FDA Panel may recommend pulling some acetaminophen drugs
A government advisory panel began voting Tuesday on recommendations for reducing the risk of serious liver injury associated with acetaminophen, found in over-the-counter drugs such as Tylenol and NyQuil.
The panel, assembled by the Food and Drug Administration, is weighing several options, including reducing recommended dosages of acetaminophen or pulling combination drugs, such as NyQuil, from stores' shelves entirely.

Next time you're in Britain, check your change
The Royal Mint admits it's made a rare error, producing coins without a date on them for the first time in centuries.
The mint said Monday that at least 100,000 of the year-less 20-pence coins, normally worth 33 U.S. cents at face value, slipped into circulation at the end of last year.
If found, one coin would garner hundreds of times more on the collectors' market.

Masons' spat over black inductee spills into court

There are a few prerequisites for anyone applying to be a Freemason: You must be a man, you can't be a slave, you must have good character and you must have faith in a supreme being.

Those broad rules have allowed some of the more progressive chapters in the centuries-old fraternal organization, such as Atlanta's Gate City Lodge No. 2, to fill their ranks with diverse members.

The chapter's leaders say that racial harmony was threatened recently when other Freemasons sought to revoke the lodge's charter for allowing Victor Marshall, who is black, to join up. The dispute has drawn the normally secretive group into a rare public battle.

( Article Under Cut )

You remember the guy who claims there's no racial discrimination in Texas? At least in his little portion of it.

His argument essentially was "we don't discriminate against blacks and browns--we ain't got none!"

Turns out that the Supreme Court agrees with him. It was a 9-0 decision.

And I'll leave you with a remembrance of his most quotable line, and my response to it:

In deposition testimony he reiterated for [the reporter], he said he had never known or heard of any racial discrimination in Texas, in all of his 46 or so years in the state. "I don't know of any – if there's been some, educate me!"

I still don't know what to say.

ETA: The Voting Rights Act hasn't really been gutted by this bill; it's just had the road towards being gutted paved. Also, though the article online says this was a unanimous vote, NPR tells me it was 8-1, with Clarence Thomas(!!) dissenting. Who's a girl to believe?</strong>

The US Army is storing prisoners in Iraq in 3x3x6 crates. The military said the boxes are humane and are checked every 15 minutes. It said detainees, who stand in the boxes, are isolated for no more than 12 hours at a time.

As I mentioned to popfiend some time ago, I've been meaning to write this post for a long, long time, and now I've suddenly got a kick-in-the-pants incentive to do it now.

I think that people who insist on absolute rights of privacy do so out of fear. Sometimes the fear is justified--some people have lost their jobs because of unwanted revelations; others have lost friends and respect. "How will people react if they find out this thing about me" is a natural fear, though I think it's generally blown out of proportion. I generally come down on the side of The Transparent Society in the privacy vs. free speech debate.

I also think that the fear is self-fulfilling. People often hide things that they don't need to hide out of shame, when in fact the shame is the weapon. When the government does background checks in order to grant military clearances, they will frequently ask questions that they already know the answer to, just in order to find out how you'll respond; it's OK if you have a background in the BDSM community, or six prior divorces, or are gay, or despise your birth family, just as long as you're not trying to hide it. What you try to hide is a weapon. What you are open about can't be used to blackmail you.

I'm not a very private person. I do not have much to hide. That's because there really isn't a damn thing in the world that I have to be afraid of. I am ashamed of very little, and though there is much I regret, it's probably not what you think it is.

If you ask questions of me, I will either tell you that I don't want to talk about it, or I will answer them. If I don't want to talk about it, I expect you to respect that, and if you don't, you're gone. I don't mind you asking again later, though, if you still want to know.

I don't delete my web browser history for any reason except that it's time to clear a cache. I don't care who has my home address or phone number, except insofar as I try to keep those things semi-private for reasons of convenience--that is, to avoid spammers. I don't use my legal last name because I don't like it, but if you want to know what it is I will tell you. I generally don't reveal details of my past to people unless I think they have a right or need to know, but that's not out of shame or out of trying to hide anything; that's because much of it isn't exactly fun-happy-time cocktail party conversation. If people ask, I tell them; if they don't, I typically don't bring it up.

I do not have anything that I want to hide from any of you. I just have a lot of shit that I don't talk about much.

In my experience, people who are the most insistent about their rights to privacy are those who have something to hide or something to fear. Those are the same people who try to use other people's fears as a weapon.

If any of you who are privy to it want to know details about the accusations and malice that ulitave was spreading in his latest post, ask me. Much of it is true; much of it is a lie; all of it was intended to hurt and discredit me.

But that only works when there's more than one person playing the game.




P.S.: There's much juicier information left out, so ask about *that* if you want the good stuff. I'll tell you if you want to know.

Brought to my attention by archanglrobriel: "The art market is not sexist," [art critic Brian] Sewell said. "The likes of Bridget Riley and Louise Bourgeois are of the second and third rank. There has never been a first-rank woman artist.

"Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness. Women make up 50 per cent or more of classes at art school. Yet they fade away in their late 20s or 30s. Maybe it's something to do with bearing children."

. . . . Yeah.

Also, you can take your pick of ways to spin this story: Either FEMA is deliberately inflating the numbers that it wants the public to believe that it is spending, or FEMA employees are so damn dumb that they can't fucking count.

. . . . Yeah.


In better news, this asshole was finally caught. I didn't think that would happen in my lifetime. This thing is Hitler without all the publicity. I'm generally opposed to capital punishment, but I can't think of a punishment bad enough for what it did. Certainly a relatively painless death by hanging or injection is far too good for it.

Have a nice day, I guess.

Oregon is running a lottery, wherein the grand prize is Sixty Million Dollars basic health insurance.

No, really.

From an article in the Austin Chronicle about a local suburb that is challenging the Voting Rights Act in court:

Canyon Creek's attempt to secede from the racial history of Texas is amusingly brazen; the effective translation of its nondiscrimination claim is, "We don't discriminate against blacks and browns; we ain't got none." (Of the suburb's 3,600 or so residents, in what is now a majority-minority city, fewer than 7% are African-American or Latino.) Don Zimmerman, the best-known MUD board member (he ran for the state House in District 50 and is currently campaigning for Ron Paul), pointed out to me that most of Canyon Creek's minority residents (11.6%) are of Asian heritage, "because of all the high tech work out here." In deposition testimony he reiterated for me, he said he had never known or heard of any racial discrimination in Texas, in all of his 46 or so years in the state. "I don't know of any – if there's been some, educate me!"

I don't know what to say.

Out of the Frying Pan: A homeland security adviser to Rudy Giuliani came under fire Thursday for claiming there were "too many mosques" in the United States — and defended himself by saying his point was that not enough Muslim leaders cooperate with law enforcement.
Here's a quote, taken directly from the published interview: "Unfortunately we have too many mosques in this country, there's too many people who are sympathetic to radical Islam. We should be looking at them more carefully, we should be finding out how we can infiltrate, we should be much more aggressive in law enforcement." -- Emphasis mine

Bento for Cheap Bastards

Rumor has it that velociraptors were feathered! Pass it on!

US-led forces in Iraq say they have arrested an Iranian officer operating in the north of the country.

A Hartlepool man is facing jail after he urinated on a disabled woman who lay dying in the street.
The 27-year-old shouted "this is YouTube material" ... He tried to rouse her by throwing a bucket of water over her, before urinating on her and covering her with shaving foam. The incident was filmed on a mobile phone.

A high school teacher in Oregon is suing for the right to carry a handgun to work.

DISSED!--or "Hold my calls, unless it's God; you can patch Him through to my voicemail."
Pope Benedict XVI refused to meet US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in August, saying he was on holiday. Rice "made it known to the Vatican that she absolutely had to meet the pope" to boost her diplomatic "credit" ahead of a trip to the Middle East, but "The pope is on holiday" was the official response.

And in related news: Israel declares Gaza "enemy entity" as Rice visits

Howard J. Krongard, the State Department's inspector general, has repeatedly thwarted investigations into contracting fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan, including construction of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, and censored reports that might prove politically embarrassing to the Bush administration, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform charged yesterday in a 13-page letter.

A man who tried to tow his 35-foot fishing vessel to a marina by paddling in a 9-foot inflatable boat was fished out of a Long Island canal by Coast Guard officials Wednesday.
Pasquale reportedly started towing the Barbara Ann at 5:30 a.m from the East Islip Marina, and had managed to move it about 100 yards in three hours when both the Coast Guard and Islip Harbor Police stopped him.

The woman who murdered her husband with a shotgun is now suing for custody of their children so that she "help her children heal emotionally from the loss of their father."

A team of scientists working in Georgia has unearthed the remains of four human-like creatures dating to 1.8 million years ago.

The head of an alligator that bit off a man's arm will be mounted and offered to the victim, a state contractor who caught the reptile said Wednesday.

Oh, and unless we raise the credit limit for the fifth goddamned time during Bush's time in office, we're going to hit out debt limit of 8.965 trillion on October first. And any of you who have ever voted Republican "because you're fiscally conservative"--how's that working out for you, eh?

I am sick, just friggin' sick to death, of smug twenty somethings who announce that "Americans are stupid." It only makes it worse that most of those that I find making the announcement are Americans who have never even visited, much less lived in, another country.

Y'know, there are lots of Americans who are stupid. There are also lots of French, Italians, Germans, Portugese, Spaniards, English, Irish, Swiss, Dutch, Austrian, Russian, Chinese, Asian, Australian, African and Polish people who are stupid. Here's a whack with a cluebat: Stupidity is not a state that is unique to, nor even concentrated in, America. It's a human trait, not an American one.

Something that both amuses and disgusts me is that the folk who do this usually consider themselves to be liberal and tolerant people. They would never, ever, consider announcing that "Jews are greedy," or "Negroes are lazy," or "Germans are murderous," or "Poles are stupid," or "Italians are cowardly." But "Americans are stupid" doesn't seem to present any sort of intellectual or ethical challenge to them.

I've been calling people on this sort of bullshit for the past coupla weeks on LJ. I know that it's pointless, I know that people who are willing to use this sort of extreme generalization are also not likely people who are willing to have their convictions challenged. Yes, I also know that I've just used an extreme generalization myself. That's OK; it's my journal.

One person responded to me by explaining that Americans are stupid because our language doesn't make any sense. Apparently the fact that we call "football" by an American name ("soccer") is plenty of reason to call us stupid. Sure, why not?

Another wrote off anything I had to say by looking at my profile page, discovering that I'm in Texas, and refusing to say anything substantive at all after that. Her idea of "making a point" was to refer to ten gallon hats and Budweiser.

All of this has helped in affirming my original conclusions, the ones I reached in early childhood: People are stupid. Nationality, race, ethnic origin--these things don't matter. If you're human, you likely suck.

I've made a life that includes people who are better than that. I think I'll start to let the other little idiots alone. That's a war I can't win; I'll be overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

But I want to say it publicly, so I will.

There are people, places, and even specific speeches and tones of voice that can pull off having a final "good day" as just short of a "Fuck you and rot in hell." However, this only works if the rest of the speech, haranguement, what-have-you has been held to an extremely strict standard of courtesy and coolness. Once you've used your conversation (or *ahem* comment) to accuse someone of being rude, stupid, and completely lacking in integrity, finishing with a "good day" only makes you sound like a whiny wanker who's learned just enough rhetorical tricks to make yourself dangerous.*




* To your reputation.**

** If you have one.