Drool

I want one.

Shh! Silence in the Library!

A Japanese show combining two of my favorite things:

Engrish and a little good-natured torture.

Watching this late at night with my roommate down

the hall, I felt like one of the contestants.

A Foolproof Defense?

NOTE: I try to keep my posts away from politics as much as possible on this blog (but not in meatspace, much to the chagrin of certain members of my family), because there are many more qualified people out there who can report on political issues. Some might see this as a political post, but this really just cracked me up.

As many of you who know me personally know, I'm a big Stephen Colbert fan. It's not really surprising to me that Tom DeLay would also be a Stephen Colbert fan, but with his latest defense fund push it's not really clear if he knows that Stephen Colbert from the Colbert Report is a character, and not a real-life journalist/pundit.

The confusion comes from a video on his defense fund website of Stephen Colbert haranguing a filmmaker in a segment clearly designed to make fun of Tom DeLay's legal troubles. Robert Greenwald (the man being interviewed) is portrayed as having "crashed and burned" in the Colbert interview in the latest mailing being sent out by DeLay's defense fund.

"Hollywood liberal and Michael Moore wannabe Robert Greenwald ... crashed and burned on comedy Central's The Colbert Report (watch it at http://www.defenddelay.com/ ) when promoting his new attack on Tom Delay. He even admits their reason for producing the movie (and clearly Ronnie Earle's reason for participating) - to keep Republicans from gaining power in Congressional seats across the country."

There is no trace of sarcasm or irony as far as I can tell. It leaves you scratching your head, wondering if he has suddenly grown a sense of humor about his impending prison term, or if he really thinks this video made his point for him? It's a funny clip, anyway.

Note: The ninja has no comment at this time, as he is busy fighting pirates at the moment.

199!

Just...need...one...more...page hit...

Making Sense of Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality is an issue that hopefully we will be hearing a lot more about, because it is an issue that affects us all, and one that few people even realize exists. One of the reasons why people haven't looked into it is because there have been conflicting and confusing reports on what it is and what the potential impact is, so I'll try to keep it simple.

Net Neutrality means that Internet Service Providers can charge for how much data is sent and received by its customers, but it cannot regulate the data based on its content. It doesn't matter if you're downloading porn, listening to streaming music, or emailing your grandma, the carriers must remain neutral and pass all data through equally. This rule was set up when the government first subsidized the creation of the Internet backbone that these carriers own, and it's been that way for years, but now the carriers are lobbying congress to change the rules. They want to be able to offer a higher Quality of Service (QoS) to customers who pay a premium. QoS is a method of handling traffic that affects data flow the most when your connection is saturated. It lets certain kinds of traffic take priority over others, serving up "premium" traffic and then passing along "bleacher seat" traffic when the premium traffic is done.

The argument the carriers give is that they should be able to charge people who serve up content like streaming movies and audio more than regular users. It stands to reason, they say, that theese users should pay more, since their content uses up more bandwidth (think of it as the volume of data passing through the pipe, much like measuring water usage). The flaw in this reasoning is that they already charge people a set rate for bandwidth when people sign up. As an example, a DSL user at home typically would pay a fee each month for a 1.5Mbps connection, which means that they are able to download 1.5 Megabits per second of data. They cannot go higher; the ISP will cap off the amount of data that is allowed to pass through that connection.

The ISPs will also claim that they must be allowed to regulate the data that passes over their networks, otherwise someone with a cable connection that is a heavy user could slow down everybody else's traffic. This argument doesn't really make any sense, because it's a problem that was solved back in the good old days of dial-up and ISDN connections: if someone is using up an inordinately large amount of bandwidth, you limit a) the connection speed, and b) the total amount of data they are allowed to download without paying extra. It's an easily solved billing issue.

So why bother? Why are the Internet backbone carriers spending big money to lobby Congress for the elimination of Net Neutrality requirements?

The first reason is the simplest, which I like to call the AOL reason. The carriers are trying to find a way to sell more bandwidth than they have, and QoS gives them an excuse to throw some traffic on the back burner in order to let their premium customers' content go through without expanding their service. I don't know if you remember the whole debacle in the 1990's where AOL was selling more subscriptions than it could actually give service to, resulting in customers not being able to connect for hours and sometimes days on end. This would be the equivalent of AOL setting up premium accounts, where customers who were willing to pay an extra $20 a month would get their own dedicated access numbers while the regular customers were still getting the busy signal.

The second reason is plain old greed. It essentially amounts to extortion of the larger customers who are serving up content, but I think there is another huge reason why they are trying to get this legislation passed quickly and silently. There are very few applications that legitimately need very high throughput, and the biggest of these is Voice Over IP (VOIP). VOIP is the ability to make phone calls over the Internet, which costs much, much less than a standard phone call, and the Internet backbone carriers are --you guessed it -- telephone companies. One company already tried blocking VOIP traffic over their networks, but a court ruled it illegal. With the erosion of Net Neutrality rules, not only would that no longer be illegal, but there would also be other ramifications. Yahoo and SBC already have a business relationship. What would stop Yahoo from making a deal with SBC to block their customers from using Google? For that matter, what would stop them from purposedly slowing down streaming video traffic for all users that refuse to pay for their "premium" service? I have streaming videos on my blog, but I can't afford to pay extra money on top of my hosting fees for that.

I hope I've explained it well enough, but if you still need more convincing, Ask a Ninja.

We Interrupt this John Gibson Commentary...

...for some quality entertainment.

(be sure to stick around until the yodeling starts)

John Gibson Responds to Allegations of Racism

John Gibson has responded angrily to critics such as myself who have denounced his well-meaning remarks on preserving the country through eugenics. He has made two separate defenses of his piece, hurling masses of flaming rhetoric at those who took the opportunity to call him the "r" word, claiming they pieced together parts of his speech out of context to portray him in a negative light.In the spirit of fairness, I'll post his rebuttals here for my extensive world-wide audience.

Point One - I'm not a racist, I'm a nationalist. There's a difference.

"My concern was simply that I didn't want America to become Europe, where the birth rate is so low the continent is fast being populated by immigrants, mainly from Muslim countries, whose birth rate is very high," adding, "I said ... it was also a good idea if people other than Hispanics also got busy and have more babies. Those people would include both blacks and whites. I suppose Asians, too."

Well that's refreshing. He isn't prejudiced against all other races besides his own, which makes his discrimination a-ok. He doesn't want to get rid of all of the other races, he just wants to be able to dictate the levels of each race that are living within our borders. How magnanimous of him to invite the little races to join with him in the babymaking offensive. Why, even the Asians can join, I suppose, as long as they're American and not Hispanic. (Apparently it hasn't occurred to Mr. Gibson yet that many, many Hispanic people are in fact *gasp* American! Shh! Don't tell him. We're going to wait to see how long it takes him to figure it out.)

Point Two - I'm being misquoted.

"I did say Hispanics have a higher birth rate than others in this country, but what I also said was that the others shouldn't make Hispanics carry the whole load of population replenishment. It's hard work having kids.

A Fox-hating and Gibson-hating blog reported [that] Gibson said brown people are bad, whites should have babies to keep browns down. This is not true. Not what I said, not what I meant, not what I think, yet this lie has even appeared in Time magazine."

I have to admit, that's not what he said. John Gibson actually suggested that we should make more babies because the Hispanic race is being forced to be the Atlas to our teetering babysphere because we are selfishly refraining from procreating. Haven't we all heard this argument before? We need Hispanic immigrants because they come to America and make the babies that Americans refuse to make.

Final Point: Europe is on the brink of collapse due to reproductive selfishness, and we're next!

"Why? Because we see what is happening in Europe. Russia is a good example. When people stop having babies because they are inconvenient, populations cease being self-sustaining, end up filling population gaps with immigrants who then make demands on the culture the homies might not like, such as demands for Sharia law
in some parts of Europe."

Maybe a better heading for this argument would be "I'm not a racist, I'm an idiot." John Gibson seems bound and determined to convince us that he really thinks that every time an American child is born *poof* a Hispanic immigrant child disappears into the ether. What other conclusions are we left with when he presents this "solution" to his purported "problem"? In John Gibson's world these immigrants and their babies are sucked into the vortex created by the baby vaccuum left behind by our disinterest in parenting.

My Conclusion - Is John Gibson a racist, or is he just appallingly stupid?

Yes.

A Teen Movie 3000 Years in the Making...

And don't miss Must Love Jaws, the heartwarming family movie about men, chum, and a special friendship that would last forever.

John Gibson is a Racist Sack of Crap and Other Fine Stories

I don't toss around the R-word much, but this really got to me. I didn't even really know who John Gibson was until I read about this. Here's a video of his segment, which I originally found at Media Matters. His thesis? You need to do your duty and make more babies, because over half of all children under 5 are minorities, and white people just aren't producing as fast as other ethnic groups. (click play below to start the video)

Update: Stephen Colbert weighs in with some hard-hitting commentary below.

There are several big assumptions he's making here (and he puts the 'ass' in assumptions):

1. He's assuming that his viewers are white. A piece of advice for next time, John. Before you begin a segment like this, preface it with something along these lines: "I've got something important to tell all of the white people here, so I'm going to have to ask all the brown people to leave the room for five minutes. Just head out to the kitchen and make yourself a beef chimichanga or some monkey brains or whatever it is that you people eat."
2. He's assuming that all of his white viewers are only having sex with other white people. In fairness, however, he may have intended this to be the first of a two-part series, with part two being, "Okay, now that you're getting your eugenic groove on, let's talk about the purity of the white race, and how you can help by being more selective about who you bump uglies with."
3. He's assuming that white people are ready to have babies, but either forgot to breed or were really just waiting for a good reason.
4. A "comfortable" life involves a BMW with leather seats?!?
5. Finally, he seems to be assuming that the advice given to his generation that the population was growing too quickly is invalid because the percentage of white people is dropping.

Any way you slice it, John Gibson is a waste of skin with a freaky haircut. Seriously. I mean, was he going for that "Bram Stoker's Dracula" look, or what?

It finally happened.

I was getting ready for bed, went to use the restroom first, and got lost on my way back to my room. I've always had trouble with my sense of direction, but this has got to be some kind of a record. I turned off the light and stood there in the dark for what seemed an eternity and then made a right turn down the hall. I even had a 50% chance of getting it right by accident, but I ended up in the living room.

To quote the words of Han Solo, surely the wisest man ever to wield a blaster, "Sometimes I amaze even myself."

Dear Teeny-Bopper Girl Magazine...

...today I had the most embarassing day of my life.

I know most of your readers will breathe a sigh of relief when I tell you that it has nothing to do with being caught at the school dance in white pants without a tampon. It all started off with a simple problem: no clean underwear. Perhaps I would have made another decision if it hadn't been so early in the morning. If only...but it's too late for that now. I had two viable alternatives: wear dirty underwear or no underwear at all. I opted to go commando.

Normally that wouldn't have been a big deal. I spend all day sitting down at my computer, so it's not like anyone would ever know. Today, however, the gods would not look kindly on my attempts to buck my fate. But before I go any further, let me weave another thread into this story. I have been losing weight recently. It's not much; I won't be on any posters, spam, or pop-under ads anytime soon selling miracle cures for obesity. I have, however, noticed that my pants have begun to sag more than they used to. I hadn't done anything about it, but I had resolved to add a notch to my belt in the near future in an attempt at forcing them to sit more normally on my waist. Several hours and one pair of pants later, I see that I really should have done that much, much sooner.

By now some of you have probably guessed what happened, but here goes: I had just gotten off the train on my way home and had started to walk down the walkway to where my car was parked when I noticed out of the corner of my eye that my shoelace was untied. After a quick look behind me to make sure there wasn't anyone following close behind, I squatted down to tie my shoe. With a sickening rip the crotch of my khakis gave out. The first thought that went through my head was to push my legs together to hide the rip. Unfortunately when I looked down to survey the extent of the damage, what I thought was a tear was a gaping hole in my pants, and staring back at me like a big hairy fleshy eyeball was my right nut. My pants had ripped all the way up the seam next to the zipper almost completely up to the waistband. Clearly putting my legs together wasn't going to be enough. With a sharp intake of breath I tried to squat down in order to reduce my exposure, but I only succeeded in making the gash in the fabric flap open like one of those old rubber coin purses. I made it the rest of the way back by holding my backpack over my groin as nonchalantly as I could, trying for all the world not to give any indication that my gonads were playing some kind of perverted peekaboo. No one gave any indication that they saw, but I sure as hell wasn't going to look at them and risk making eye contact. I oozed over to my car as surreptitiously as was possible and sped off before anyone could say anything.

I guess I can only hope that this builds character...

A Rare Chance to Watch George Bush

It's rare that we get a glimpse of the President when he doesn't expect it. We will probably never meet the man in person, and so it is hard to imagine knowing the man. I think this video is a nice way to get a look at him that we are rarely afforded. The video is at the bottom of this post, but if you're not familiar with the event last Saturday you should read on for some context.

This is a clip of a dinner last Saturday for the White House Press Corps and various other dignitaries. Stephen Colbert was the keynote speaker, and he gave a performance that was amazingly good and took huge testicles. You see Stephen Colbert, for those of you who are not familiar with his work, is a satirist. He has a show where he plays a pundit like the kind you might see on Fox News, MSNBC, or a similar 24-hour news network, only taken to the extreme. You won't see a whole lot of smiles or laughing if you see any footage of the event, and some reporters have tried to attribute this to his not being funny. Nothing could be further from the truth. The problem wasn't his lines. The problem was that every person in the room was the butt of the joke, and it cut way too close to the bone for the reporters and politicians in the audience.

Two subjects stood out: Scandals and alleged mishandling of the government by the Bush administration, and the hypocrisy of reporters who were cheerleaders for this government until public opinion turned against them. Neither is considered polite conversation by this particular crowd. There is a decent quality video of the last part of his speech here, courtesy of C&L, and a transcript of the whole speech here.

I'll just give you a quick synopsis of what's going on in the video that President Bush is watching. Stephen Colbert is showing him his "audition tape" of what it would have been like if he had been hired as Press Secretary (if you recall, Scott McLellan is being replaced by Tony Snow). After he flees the press conference he is followed by the 85-year old Helen Thomas, who has been a White House reporter for decades, and became famous/infamous (depending on who you ask) for grilling the President recently at a press conference.

You can tell that the President is trying hard to keep his composure, but his feelings leak through. You can see him visibly grimace when the on-screen Colbert is asked about possible criminal proceedings against Karl Rove, but you can tell that he also has a good-natured laugh about the way Stephen Colbert "handles" some of the journalists. I won't say more; you can draw your own conclusions, but it strikes me that this is one of the most human moments I've ever seen of George W. Bush.


UPDATE: Unfortunately C-SPAN asked YouTube to remove the video. Here's the link to the whole speech from Google video, but it doesn't have the camera that stayed on Bush's face while the audition tape was playing.

Hateful Cultists Gone Wild!

I've known of the existence of the Westboro Baptist Church (don't be fooled by the name, they have no connection with any Baptist organization) for several years now because I had come across one of their hateful websites. These last couple of years, though, they haven't been content to just stand out on the highway with bilboards and signs. They've been "protesting" at soldiers' funerals. Spewing hatred like vomit from demon-possessed little girls (you know how they can be), they usually stay out of the spotlight. Their primary message is that virtually every horrible thing that happens in this world (Terrorism, hurricanes, dead soldiers, etc.) is the result of a vengeful god exercising his wrath against the people of the earth. They expend most of their vitriol reserves exhorting against the acceptance of homosexuality, but they have plenty of contempt to go around, weighing in on such lofty topics as why God deliberately killed the people in the World Trade Center, mocked them, and cast them into hell and why the Holocaust was deserved because the Jews killed Jesus (but wasn't a big deal anyway).

Side note: I've always wondered how people could be stupid enough to hate Jews because "they killed Jesus". By that logic, shouldn't they also hate Italians? But I digress...

Why would anyone waste their time keeping tabs on a group full of lunatics like this one? Why would I create a post on my blog about them? Why not just leave them to eventually fade into obscurity? I'm about to tell you why, because it would be a little strange to ask myself a bunch of questions out loud and then not let people know the answers.

Where was I? Oh, yes. I've kept an eye on this "church" for the same reason I've scoured the Internet, looking sometimes in places that I wish I hadn't later (don't ask). I've always wondered how much of what I experience is unique. I will probably spend the rest of my life trying to understand how much of what I've known arises from the human condition, and how much I created myself.

When I was about six years old, the world seemed so large to me that I thought surely there must be someone out there doing exactly what I was doing at the exact same time. I would walk across the soccer field and imagine that person, maybe somewhere on the other side of the world, that was walking in another field, our steps matching exactly by pure chance. At the same time it also occurred to me -- although I never connected the ideas -- that it was entirely possible that everybody in the world saw different colors than everyone else. We would, of course, never know the difference, because you and I would still call the color we saw "green", even if what I really saw looked more like what you see when you're looking at something purple.

As I got older, the world shrank a lot. When I first heard about the idea of the infinite monkeys at their infinite typewriters, it reminded me of my doppleganger theory from when I was a kid, but by then it just seemed ridiculous. The world of people grew smaller too, but it stretched thinner, and I started to give up trying to understand them. Words are really only "good enough", and I realized that I would never be able to ask anyone how we were similar, because they would never be able to tell me, even if they wanted to.

Here's my point, if there could be said to be one: When you see the limits to which someone's humanity can be stretched, it helps you understand yourself. In a way, observing someone with whom you seem to have nothing in common reveals more about yourself than a conversation with a good friend. Like it or not, we all share commonalities with Fred Phelps, spiritual leader of the Westboro Baptist Church. We may never wield our words with such venom, but in him and his there are certain negative qualities distilled to a form so pure that I can't help but watch with fascination.

I Can't Sleep...

...so heed my exhortation! Just because Congress is suddenly concerned about gas prices and immigration shouldn't distract you from this. Immigration and gas/oil price gouging have been ongoing problems for years, but this one will affect virtually every issue that comes along in the near future.

Oh, and before I forget, I am officially nominating Stephen Colbert as the man with the biggest balls in the world.

NOTE: That's not a link to Stephen Colbert's balls. It's a link to a site with the video of his hilarious bit at the White House Correspondent's Dinner.