30 June, 2015
29 June, 2015
So Many Stupid Flag Stories
Walmart Apologizes for Making ISIS Cake for Man Denied Confederate Flag Design
Jun 29, 2015, 1:23 PM ET
By SUSANNA KIM
A man in Louisiana is asking for an explanation from Walmart after his request for a Confederate flag cake at one of its bakeries was rejected, but a design with the ISIS flag was accepted.
Chuck Netzhammer said he ordered the image of the Confederate flag on a cake with the words, "Heritage Not Hate," on Thursday at a Walmart in Slidell, Louisiana. But the bakery denied his request, he said. At some point later, he ordered the image of the ISIS flag that represents the terrorist group.
"I went back yesterday and managed to get an ISIS battleflag printed. ISIS happens to be somebody who we're fighting against right now who are killing our men and boys overseas and are beheading Christians," Netzhammer said.
A spokesman for Walmart told ABC News, "An associate in a local store did not know what the design meant* and made a mistake. The cake should not have been made and we apologize."
What are they apologising for exactly ? Other than letting themselves be made fools of.
Let's just ban everything. All visual expressions that might conceivably offend someone somewhere somehow. Although maybe we could add a tiny exemption for repeating geometrical patterns and verses of the...
* 'Did not know what the design meant' ? You're shitting me, surely ?
Wishful Thinking at its Best
Report: Russia's right wing is egging on Texas' secessionist movement
By John-Henry Perera | June 23, 2015 | Updated: June 23, 2015 11:46am
A Russian newspaper conducted an interview with Nathan Smith, a representative of the Texas Nationalist Movement, who just happened to be in St. Petersburg for a right-wing convention in Spring 2015.
Google Translate is a little rusty when it comes to the Cyrillic alphabet, but Smith's interview is more or less a repeat of everything we've heard before from pro-secessionists: Why should we be part of a union that takes but never gives back? U.S. policy is bad for Texas. We can do better on our own.
Politico writer Casey Michel notes that Texas' homegrown movement is delicious for Russian right wingers who blame much of the country's ills on the U.S., particularly after the recent sanctions on the country following the Crimean invasion in 2014. It also plays well with the country's long-term strategy of destabilizing the west.
"Cheered primarily by Igor Panarin, a former KGB agent and head of the Russian Foreign Ministry's diplomatic academy, the theory posits that a fractured United States, akin to the Soviet Union's demise, would disintegrate entirely, with nearby nations hoovering the assorted states."
The Russians cannot possibly be this stupid...can they ?
Although I see where the Russian's are coming from in the current tensions with the West, although I understand their point of view regarding maintaining influence in their backyard, and although I agree with much of their criticism of NATO, I think there's one thing they maybe misunderstand: Much as people throughout the world may harbour some distrust of the United States and its motives, including many in the West, and even in the United States itself, they don't necessarily hate the US. And many of them share that distrust of America with a desire to be American themselves.
Russia, on the other hand, isn't exactly beloved by many of its neighbours, to say the least (never mind how the rest of the world sees the country, fairly or not), and for the many states that left the Warsaw pact and/or the Soviet Union after the latter's collapse it was very explicitly a question of liberation from what they saw as a decades-long* oppressive foreign influence. An opinion that would be held in many of those countries by a clear majority.
The occasional mutterings of discontent in states like Texas, Alaska, Arizona, or wherever in the US, are little more than a temporal political protest, usually against the particular policies at one point in time of one ruling party. The Texans aren't going to secede today any more than the so-called 'blue-states' were after the Bush-Gore decision in 2000, however much gnashing of teeth there may have been at the time.
And yet, even if the Russians aren't stupid enough to think that a secession of Texas or any other American state is remotely likely, they sure do put an awful amount of money and effort into their anti-Western and Western-targeted propaganda outfits, possibly the jewel in the crown of which is RT (formerly Russia Today). RT is a well-financed, slick media outfit, staffed with many Western presenters, that just so happens to specialise day after day after day in reporting on stories that make the West (The US & UK especially) look bad (some more justifiably, some less)
And there's an audience for the type of thing they cover. An audience that occasionally includes me for that matter, well aware of the propagandistic agenda as I may be. And there's a fair number of mid-level media-personalities in the West (usually either of the more slightly radical lefty or the more libertarian political persuasion) that flock to work with RT, eager as they are to get any coverage of opinions that they know are increasingly locked out from the mainstream corporate-media in the West.
But the vast majority of people in the West don't care what those individuals say, don't watch RT, don't read Sputnik or the Moscow Times, and won't be touched by the comments of Putin's keyboard-armies on the pages of the Telegraph or the Indy or on CiF on the Guardian. The criticism of the West (some of it justified) never quite reaches them, whilst daily they absorb the news & the jokes from the mainstream media that reinforce their inherited view of Russians as inherently evil two-dimensional cartoon-villains.
I suspect that the Russian government just fundamentally hasn't come to terms with how to either successfully manipulate or to interpret public opinion in the age of social media. And I don't really know why, other to assume that it's that age-old question of no-one wanting to tell the emperor that he may have ever-so slightly imagined his own attire.
Whatever. We're all be dead soon if we keep the idiotic wargames up at the current rate.
* Or more.
27 June, 2015
River Song Returns
Alex Kingston to reprise River Song for new Doctor Who audio plays
River Song (Alex Kingston) will cross paths with the Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann) in a new series of Doctor Who audio plays.
Kingston will reprise her role as the time-traveling archaeologist in Doctor Who: Doom Coalition 2 from Big Finish Productions.
Best known for their audio plays based on the classic Doctor Who series, Big Finish have recently begun branching out into new series material with the upcoming box-set UNIT: Extinction starring Jemma Redgrave (Kate Stewart) and Ingrid Oliver (Osgood).
Doom Coalition 2 will be released in March 2016 - with Kingston joined by McGann, plus Nicola Walker and Hattie Morahan as the Doctor's companions Liv Chenka and Helen Sinclair.
River will then return later in 2016 with her own spinoff series - Doctor Who: The Diary of River Song, a four-hour adventure which will again feature McGann in its final installment.
Further 2016 efforts from Big Finish based on the new series will include Doctor Who: The Churchill Years - with Ian McNeice reprising his role of Winston Churchill to narrate a four-hour saga, recounting the indomitable Prime Minister's unseen encounters with the Doctor.
Meanwhile, Doctor Who: Classic Doctors, New Monsters will pit the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Doctors against creatures invented for the new series.
Well, I for one welcome the return of River Song, although I understand why some might not like the character. And interesting how they're slowly slipping in elements of the new series. Not so likely to get Eccleston of course, but maybe in a one-off recording one day...
<rant>Only thing I don't like about this is...blasted box-sets again. It's such a stupid format for a digital era, hasn't exactly encouraged the best writing in the past, and accelerates the splintering of BF's offerings to such a degree that it's difficult for fans to keep track of it all, never mind afford them (single-releases, at least they can dip in and out, one manageably long story at a time). But Briggs & Co. have made it clear that the box-sets are where everything's going, like it or not.</rant>
“The idea of River meeting previous Doctors was actually proposed by Steven Moffat,” says producer David Richardson, “and it's just irresistible, isn't it? Alex embraced the idea of returning to the role, and so she will be starring in no less than two box sets next year. And yes, we are still pinching ourselves!”
A Little More on that Decision about Same-Sex Marriage
First, Digby has a good point about where this places the US, relative to the rest of the world. Isn't that often the US leads the rest of the world on a progressive issue.
As for how we got here, I was just reading (okay, skimming -- those justices carry on and on and on) some of Robert's dissent, and I do tend to agree with him that this is a change that should have been legislated, and do tend to think that this will rankle with social conservatives much more and for longer than if this change had come about democratically.
When decisions are reached through democratic means,some people will inevitably be disappointed with the results. But those whose views do not prevail at least know that they have had their say, and accordingly are—in the tradition of our political culture—reconciled to the result of a fair and honest debate.
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By deciding this question under the Constitution, the Court removes it from the realm of democratic decision. There will be consequences to shutting down the political process on an issue of such profound public significance. Closing debate tends to close minds. People denied a voice are less likely to accept the ruling of a court on an issue that does not seem to be the sort of thing courts usually decide.But I get the impression that he thinks, as other social conservatives always argue, that this should have been an issue for the states. That this should have continued to be argued state by state, with that map above slowly filling in one state at a time.
And there I'd have to fundamentally disagree. It's far too important for that. It's a question, wherever you may fall on the issue, of human rights, and inevitably any progress would have been much slower, and much harder fought in...ahem, certain states than others. And that map would have probably remained holed a good while longer, with all kinds of complications for those whose marriages would be allowed and recognised in some states and not others.
It really should have been decided legislatively, on the federal level, but maybe there was no chance of that happening with all the Tea Party-types in Congress. We'll likely never know now.
Roe v. Wade and the ongoing fight over abortion may provide some insight into what the fallout will look like, and how conservatives may fight this in the years to come. With that issue, despite what was taken as a decisive victory for abortion-rights, the conservatives have steadily chipped away over the years, such that it is now exceedingly expensive, impractical, time-consuming, and traumatic for women to obtain access to abortion-services in many states.
Then again, same-sex marriage isn't so emotive as abortion, and the divide is much more generational on this particular issue, with those opposed dwindling year by year. So perhaps they'll accept it eventually...after an electoral cycle or two.
The Spectator: The transatlantic flirtation behind Ukip’s sudden meltdown
I have no idea the degree to which, or if any of this is true, but it was long clear that Breitbart was in the bag for UKIP, probably as much if not more so than the Express.
What’s happened to poor Ukip? Not so long ago, they seemed unstoppable. They were revolting on the right, terrifying the left and shaking up Westminster. The established parties tried sneering at them, smearing them, even copying them. Nothing worked. Then came the general election, the centre held, and Ukip seemed to fall apart. Farage failed to win his target seat in South Thanet, the focus of his whole campaign. He resigned, then farcically unresigned, three days later.
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Here’s the strange thing, though: the election was not a disaster for Ukip. It was a triumph. They won 3.9 million votes — 3 million more than in 2010, and 1.5 million more than the Liberal Democrats. If that rate of growth, or anything like it, were to continue, by 2020 Nigel Farage could well be prime minister. So why has the party sabotaged itself?
To begin to understand, it helps to cross the Atlantic and meet Stephen Bannon, executive chairman of a mysteriously rich right-wing website called Breitbart....
The company Bannon runs is one of a large number of media organisations that exploit what Richard Hofstadter called the ‘paranoid style’ in US politics. Breitbart specialises in stoking up Middle American rage at big government and the liberal elite. Its founder, Andrew Breitbart, was a charismatic muckraker who worked with Matt Drudge, author of the Drudge Report and probably the most influential right-winger of the internet age. Breitbart’s site was generating huge amounts of online traffic when suddenly, at the age of 43, he dropped dead. (The coroner said heart failure; some of Breitbart’s keenest admirers say that he was poisoned by Barack Obama’s secret agents, which says something about them.) People expected Breitbart’s website to die with him but, under Bannon’s stewardship, it just got bigger. It is today a profitable company — though its press office refuses to say where the profit comes from.
The rise of Breitbart on the new media scene chimed nicely with the rise of the Tea Party, the amorphous movement within American conservatism that rose to prominence after the election of Barack Obama and the financial crash. Breitbart became essential reading for embittered American right-wingers, of whom there is no shortage.
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A spokesman for Breitbart insisted that the London office was not established to support any political party. Nevertheless, it didn’t take long for Breitbart London to become a Ukip cheerleader....
Breitbart staff were alarmed at the lack of editorial independence. ‘We effectively became the Ukip comms office,’ says one employee. ‘Any criticism of the sainted Farage was completely banned,’ says another. It’s understood that Delingpole and Kassam fell out over the site’s pro-Ukip line.
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British politicians are easily seduced by American money and power, and it seems Farage, for all his anti-elitism, was no exception. In The Purple Revolution, he positively gushes about his four days in September in the land of the free. He describes a friendly meeting with Rupert Murdoch (‘We are both outsiders who despise the establishment’), an equally amicable encounter with presidential hopeful Rand Paul (‘my political doppelgänger’) and a dinner, hosted by Breitbart in their Washington office overlooking Capitol Hill, in which he sat next to Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a Tea Party darling, and the popular talk-radio host Laura Ingraham.
It must have felt like the beginnings of a special relationship. By learning from American experts, Farage believed he could turn Ukip into a more professional outfit. Kassam and Richardson put him in touch with strategists and activists who specialised in ‘micro-campaigning’ and social media. At the same time, Breitbart and the Tea Party’s leadership saw in Farage a man with whom they could do business — a conservative quite unlike David Cameron, who had spent so long toadying up to Obama. Moreover, the Americans wanted to learn from Ukip how a new party could rattle the established order — since the Tea Party, for all its noise, had never broken out on its own, or caused any meaningful shift in the Grand Old Party.
Back home, Ukip staff quickly got fed up with what they called the ‘Tea Party tendency’ and Farage’s ‘mad love affair’ with the American right. In February, Farage annoyed his followers by missing the first day of Ukip’s spring conference in Margate because he was giving a speech to a half-empty room at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. ‘The party was seething and baffled,’ says one insider. ‘It was a major moment for Ukip and the leader wasn’t there.’
There were also growing concerns about a change in Ukip’s ‘messaging’. Farage is said to have developed a ‘shock and awe’ strategy, which involved making deliberately outrageous statements to arouse the ire of the despised political and media class. For instance, in a television debate, Farage suggested that the NHS should not treat foreigners with Aids. That prompted fury from politically correct commentators, as expected, but it also disturbed quite a few natural conservatives. ‘Shock and awful,’ said a senior Ukip source.
In an interview with Trevor Phillips, Farage also referred to a ‘fifth column’ of Muslims in this country — which led to rumours that, rather than running an election campaign, he was aiming for a well-paid gig on Fox News.
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Ukip seemed to be waging an American-style culture war — but the British didn’t appear to be interested. From October to election day, the party’s standing in the polls fell from 18 to 13 per cent. The dip can’t all be pinned on Ukip’s drift towards Tea Party politics, but a number of Kippers feel that Farage’s infatuation with America distracted him from his mission at a crucial moment, and unbalanced the delicate ecosystem that had allowed the party to flourish.
Which might explain why, after the election, Ukip’s leadership turned on itself so viciously....I never imagined they were so explicitly inter-connected however.
New Statesman: The retreat of social democracy
Leader: The retreat of social democracy
Throughout Europe, the populist right is becoming more acceptable to many. Meanwhile, social democrats are failing to adapt to globalisation.
...in Europe and throughout the west, social democracy is in crisis or retreat. The centre left is locked out of power in parliamentary systems in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and, of course, the United Kingdom. On the Continent, the experience is the same for the centre left in Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Hungary and now also Denmark, following the defeat of the centre-left bloc, which had been led by Helle Thorning-Schmidt.
The British left once looked to Scandinavia for inspiration and guidance. “If you want the American dream – go to Finland,” Ed Miliband observed. Yet Finland turfed out its centre-left coalition two months ago; three of the four Nordic countries now face being run by governments of the right. Only in Sweden is the centre left in power.
When Mr Miliband was elected as Labour leader in 2010, he was convinced that the world would turn left after the financial crisis. He gambled his entire leadership on this belief (and it was no more than that) – and he lost. Voters were certainly disturbed by widening inequality but just as important were desires for fiscal rectitude, balanced budgets and tighter controls on immigration.
The mainstream centre left has also produced an anaemic response to the rise of identity politics. It is true that parties of the radical left – such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain – have capitalised on a general mood of disenchantment but, significantly, both are Eurosceptic. More frequently, nationalism has been channelled by the mainstream centre right as well as populist insurgencies. Indeed, it was the rise of the right-wing Danish People’s Party – a Scandinavian version of the UK Independence Party – that contributed significantly to the defeat of the centre-left bloc in Denmark.
Throughout Europe, the populist right is becoming more acceptable to many. Meanwhile, social democrats are suffering from what the political scientist Peter Mair termed “indifference on the part of both the citizenry and the political class: they are withdrawing and disengaging from one another”. To many voters, the feeling of solidarity between fellow citizens so crucial to social democracy has become increasingly meaningless in an age of globalised mass migration: parties of the centre left have failed to adapt to globalisation and the collapse in trade union membership. Most fundamentally, they have not convincingly answered the existential question of what the left is for when parties of both left and right are committed to cutting public spending.
Yah. Which speaks to both the more left-leaning parties' failings on questions of immigration, and the perennial threat of nationalistic appeals against the vaguely defined 'other' undermining more progressive appeals to unite the have-nots against the haves. Increasingly, Europe, if not the Western world generally, seems poised to re-live the 1930's. And if you're not scared, you're probably not paying attention.
Really ?
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| AP Photo |
I'm not a fan of the use of the rainbow as a political symbol, as may be inferred from this previous post.
As for the question of 'gay marriage' itself, my official stance would be a libertarian one; that government should get out of the business of defining what is or isn't marriage, provide civil unions (with the same benefits & protections) for all, and let individuals and religious groups define marriage as they see fit. But generally, I'm glad that same-sex couples should find greater equality, greater acceptance, and (hopefully) greater happiness. And if they find that in us extending the definition of marriage, more power to 'em. History in the West is and has been clearly on the side of same-sex marriage, whatever I may think (and really, it's primarily if not solely the government redefining words that troubles me), and whatever the right-wing christianist bigots in the Republican party think.
Still, I do think this was ill-advised. The Supreme Court's ruling on same-sex marriage was already likely to be the rallying-point for the Republican Party's base in the next Presidential elections that so-called 'Obamacare' (and I still hear every time the intended slur in that name, how ever much the Dem's may have tried to co-opt it) was in the last. And the Obama administration just handed the GOP a needless present by turning the executive mansion into a political symbol. And why ? To provide a feel-good moment, to briefly excite the Democratic Party's more progressive supporters ? A tweet wasn't enough ?
Maybe it was in part an attempt at trolling the GOP, given all the rhetoric of the last seven years about Obama being some sort of foreign interloper in 'our house' and 'taking our house back'. If so, consider the effort successful. I hope, sincerely, that it was worth it. *
* Call it concern-trolling if you will. Whatever I may think of Hillary, the last thing the US needs is continued or expanded dominance of Congress by the GOP, and/or another Republican in the White House, at a crucial time especially for appointments to the Supreme Court. And you may have just given the Republican base their moment.
26 June, 2015
First Pussy Riot, Now This Radical Extremist
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| Original photo: Niccolò Caranti CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Do the PRC not understand how ridiculous they sound to the outside world ?
Guardian: In more innocent days, you could write about cocks and not be misunderstood
The brave and resourceful small girl in Arthur Ransome’s 1930 classic, Swallows and Amazons, is called Titty. But not, we learn, in the new film version being made by the BBC. There she will be renamed Tatty, to avoid “too many sniggers”.
It’s not the first time this indignity has befallen Titty, who was named after the traditional English fairytale, Titty Mouse and Tatty Mouse, in a more innocent age. (According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, the word “tits” only started being associated with breasts in about 1928.) She was rechristened Kitty when the story was televised by the BBC in 1963, though she re-emerged with her original name in the 1974 film adaptation, and in a later radio broadcast in 2012.
Names have long been a hazard in children’s literature. ...
“Ejaculate”, another potentially troublesome word, was at one time popular with authors as an alternative to “exclaimed”. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – not quite a children’s author but always loved by young readers – used it 23 times in his Sherlock Holmes stories, most arrestingly in The Man with the Twisted Lip (1891), when Watson, after dozing off in the great detective’s study, reports that “a sudden ejaculation caused me to wake up”.
As a doctor, Doyle would have known the term in its sexual context, but at a time when open discussion of such matters was reserved for medical textbooks, could have thought that its use in another sense was perfectly justified. More probably, he simply missed the double meaning altogether. This was also true years later of the young Dr Seuss, whose first publications in the 1930s, Boners, More Boners, Still More Boners and The Pocketbook of Boners are now collectors’ items.
“Cock” as slang for the male member has been current since 1610. Yet in the chapter headed Aunt Jane’s Treat in Richmal Crompton’s 1924 novel, William the Fourth, one of William’s respectable maiden aunts accompanies him to a fair, where she rides on a merry-go-round, mounting – as the author puts it – “a giant cock” … “It seemed to give her a joy that all her blameless life had so far failed to produce,” it says.
Something similar, again involving a cockerell-shaped fairground attraction, takes place in Angela Thirkell’s 1939 novel The Brandons. This example of light fiction was aimed not at children but at a largely female, middle-class audience whose ultra-respectability amounted to another form of assumed literary innocence.
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Today, double entendres are the regular stuff of comedy, even when writing for children. When AA Milne referred to Pooh “poohing in the sun” in a poem in The House at Pooh Corner, he unleashed decades of quiet merriment among parents and grandparents aware of how the meaning had changed since they were six. But perhaps the most devoted Milne fans reading to children now would draw the line at two American spin-offs, both picture books: Marlene Brown’s Cooking with Pooh (1995) and Isabel Gaines’s Pooh Gets Stuck (1998). Those earlier, unconscious verbal slips were so much funnier.
Ugh...
And from the earlier, related story:
This is not the first time the character’s name has been modified to avoid smirks: in a 1963 film adaptation, she became Kitty. And book publishers have made similar adjustments to children’s books in recent years: Fanny in Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree is now Frannie, and cousin Dick is now cousin Rick, while Nobby in Five Go Off in a Caravan is now Ned.
Maybe, just maybe, authors wrote in the past using perfectly normal English words and perfectly normal names, and readers read their works without breaking out into fits of giggles every five seconds because...they weren't sex-obsessed potty-brained idiots.
Personally I'm against censorship of any kind of past works, without the author's own explicit permission, which if they're dead, they obviously can't now give, but some reasons make more sense than others.
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| Image: http://tygertale.com/2014/02/11/the-black-dossier-return-of-the-golliwogg/ |
The removal of the golliwogs from Blyton for example, is understandable insofar as they were based upon traditional racist stereotypes. The offence there makes sense. But Dick ? Dick is only offensive if we choose to make it offensive. And just what are we telling children by stripping this perfectly innocent language from their literature ? And most of these usages historically were innocent, whatever the Guardian's writer may want to infer.
Just grow the fuck up people, and stop destroying our language.
Nick Clegg's Annihilation Lap
Watching this reminds me of my ongoing reaction to the hullabaloo regarding the Supreme Court's decisions on so-called 'ObamaCare', aka the ACA. I don't want the fascist asshole Republicans to get their way in denying insurance to people by constantly attacking the healthcare-law they christened 'Obamacare' despite it being modelled on their own party's proposals in the 'nineties for an alternative to the plan of the Clinton administration. But the law still sucks. It's still flawed. It's functionality still depends upon forcing people to hand over money involuntarily to massive corporations. And people will still die for lack of coverage, and/or the inability to pay.
Still, arguably horrible law as it is, missed generational opportunity at real reform as it may represent ('May' ? Who the fuck are we kidding ?), the fact is that people can obtain healthcare in the United States now who couldn't before, and who might not have been able to shortly if the Supreme Court had agreed with the latest (completely bullshit) attack on the ACA.
What did Nick Clegg's sellout buy any one ? The idea that he prevented a global economic meltdown by getting into bed with the Tories is absurd -- Every nation on Earth faced similar political considerations, including the far-more financially significant United States, but where else did a political party feel the need to sell out generations' worth of political principle for short-term power ? And if the Lib-Dems had not done a deal with the Tories, what ? What evidence was there at the time even remotely suggesting that there could be catastrophic outcomes without the coalition ? What evidence since ?
It pains me to watch this, because I'm inclined to like Nick Clegg, to root for the Liberal Democrats. Even now. Even despite all that fucker has done to destroy his own party's brand. And especially as the so-called Labour party seems divided between possibly genuinely loony Marxists like Corbyn and complete right-wing frauds like the rest of the scumbags vying for leadership.
And that's all I have to say. I feel the need to say something witty, something controversial perhaps, but no, this asshole just makes me sad. His incompetence, his idiocy, his vanity...all of it...just...makes...me...sad.
Steve Wozniak: Robots Will Make Us Their Pets
Apple’s co-founder: We’re all going to be robots’ pets one day
by Benjamin Snyder @WriterSnyder JUNE 25, 2015, 12:23 PM EDT
Apple AAPL -0.46% co-founder Steve Wozniak thinks we’re all probably going to become robots’ pets.
Speaking at a recent technology conference, Wozniak said that at first the thought of artificially intelligent beings in charge of everything scared him. But now it’s a comforting thought.
Fast forward hundreds of years to when robots are in charge. At that time, humans will probably be treated in a similar fashion to dogs, Wozniak said during an event at the Freescale Technology Forum 2015 in Austin, Texas.
“It’s actually going to turn out really good for humans,” he added. “And it will be hundreds of years down the stream before [artificially intelligent beings would] even have the ability.”
“They’ll be so smart by then that they’ll know they have to keep nature, and humans are part of nature,” he continued. “So I got over my fear that we’d be replaced by computers.”
Wozniak believes robots will helps us because we’re the “gods originally.”More like animals in a zoo surely ? If the motivation is preservation of humans as a part of nature.
And even if the robots did treat us like dogs, a lot of us treat dogs...really really horribly. And if they treated us the way the more 'humane' in society treat dogs, they would still be...restricting our population, neutering us to control our breeding, restricting our movements, controlling out interaction with other humans, strictly controlling our diets, and euthanising us when we got sick or old. Awesome future you've got mapped out for us there, Woz !
And the 'we're the "gods originally"' stuff is just wishful thinking, as is the rest of it.
What Wozniak really needs to conquer his existential angst, and what this is a form of, is religion. In this case, it's one involving the fetishisation & worship of technology, and the faith in technology always being there for us, always leading to a brighter future. A common, but often disappointing faith.
I'd suggest maybe...Buddhism instead ?
25 June, 2015
Billie Holiday: Gloomy Sunday
Would never sound as good in a non-central-European accent, but Billie gives it her best...and to the best of my knowledge, no-one died as a result of her song.
Republican Presidential Candidates with Guns
Was actually looking for Bobby Jindal's campaign-logo, when this fun family-foto caught my eye.
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| Bobby & Supriya Jolly Jindal |
Which got me wondering about the other Republican candidates posing for pictures with guns.
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| Rick Santorum |
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| Rick Perry |
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| Marco Rubio |
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| Mike Huckabee |
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| Ted Cruz (also seen in video at top with machine-gun) |
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| Rand Paul |
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| Lindsey Graham |
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| Scott Walker |
Worth mentioning of course that many of those above represent or hail from Southern and more rural states. Where hunting is popular. Which is why in half or more of the pictures, the weapons in question are...assault rifles.
Not featured above: Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, John Kasich, Ben Carson, George Pataki, and Donald Trump.
And Jindal Is In
As another pure joke-candidate.
Who nonetheless presumably paid someone to produce this logo.
Well, at least it's not burdened with an overwrought slogan. 'BOBBYJINDAL (sic) FOR PRESIDENT', that's succinct.
Who nonetheless presumably paid someone to produce this logo.
Well, at least it's not burdened with an overwrought slogan. 'BOBBYJINDAL (sic) FOR PRESIDENT', that's succinct.
Jeremy Corbyn is Either a Brilliant Troll or a Total Twat
Mr Corbyn said he would be launching a consultation on the policy over the summer as part of a package of new policies to solve the housing crisis.
The Conservatives are committed to extending Right To Buy to the tenants of housing associations – which are private, not-for-profit landlords.
If adopted, Mr Corbyn’s proposed policy would extend the same scheme to for-profit private landlords.
Right To Buy has previously been criticised by housing campaigners who say it has depleted the council housing stock and transferred it into the hands of private landlords.
Across London well over a third of one-time council homes are now rented privately to tenants – often at rents far higher than would be collected by local authorities.
Okay, so you disagree with the policies of past governments who sold off council-housing at discounted rates under right-to-buy-schemes. Because they reduced the stock of social housing, without any real plan to replace them for those who can't afford to buy a home. I get that entirely. It's understandable to say the least.
And you've floated plans in the past about allowing councils to have the 'right to buy' back properties left empty for more than six months. A little more debatable, but I see where you're coming from.
After all, how many flats, houses, and entire buildings in Britain are currently empty having been bought up by largely foreign speculators, many billionaires or multi-millionaires, purely as strategic investment-hedges ?
And so now you want to go after small-time landlords, and forcibly deprive them of rented properties that for all you know may represent their primary income ? Properties that are currently rented. That currently house families. To give them the 'right to buy' the properties at the expense of the previous generations who obtained the properties under past evil misguided 'rent to buy' policies. Are you nuts ?
I mean, I know the reason you're being allowed the farce of participating in the leadership race for Labour is that you and what you are seen to represent is discredited, and rejected, but I would hope that as a political leader, you were genuine, were honest in the undertaking. In which case...are you nuts ? This is the opposition's dream come true, whether we are talking your (at very best) centre-right opponents in your own party, or the right-wing assholes in the Conservative party.
Maybe you're really talking not about ordinary landlords, but about the ownership of vast swathes of rental property by large corporate interests. As if they wouldn't rather re-develop or sell off property rather than micro-manage individual units. Even then, going after them, and threatening to take their property, would look bad to a very large part of the electorate, smacking as it does of old-school socialism. As in actual socialism*, as opposed to the current schoolyard-taunts of referring to anyone slightly marginally to the left of the current ruling parties as 'socialist', because 'nah-nah poopy head'...
You could reform these policies in ways that encourage the restocking of social housing, and take other steps to build up the housing-stock generally, but instead, your proposal is to forcibly take the properties from people who obtained them (one would hope) legally and fairly, without them having any say in the matter of suddenly being deprived of what could be a massive personal investment.
I see on LabourList that some commentators think this is a brilliant 'tongue in cheek' move that will somehow shame the Tory's own 'Right to Buy' policies. For their own sakes, I hope they are joking too.
Oh, and if the argument is that the rents are too high -- in London that is...not that your policies are likely to be exclusive to London -- Well, why are they too high ? Is it that the landlords are just greedy ? Or is it that the lack of investment in new housing-stock, the continuation of 'right to buy' policies, the flood of economic migrants, the empty investment-properties and the rest of it, have driven up both the (inflated) valuation of the properties and the expenses of the owners whether that be in the form of taxes and/or their own living expenses, such that they have no choice but to raise the rents ?
I honestly don't know for sure. Does Corbyn ?
* And if embracing actual socialism is what Corbyn is genuinely doing, then more power to him I guess. As someone whose own politics would be at least ever so slightly to the right of his if so, I still reserve the right to call him a twat.
24 June, 2015
Survey on Europeans' Views of Ukraine
War, Russia, Poverty: Europeans ‘negative’ view of Ukraine
It was French writer Gustave Flaubert who said there is no truth, only perception. According to the Institute of World Policy in Kyiv, Europeans have a rather negative image of Ukraine.
In a recently released report war, Russia and poverty appear to be the three key words that average citizens of Europe’s most populous countries associate with the country.
The Orange revolution appears to be better known by the respondents than the Maidan protests which spun Ukraine towards Brussels, but European perceptions of Ukraine are beginning to change, if slowly, according to Olena Hetmanchuk, head of the Institute of World Policy.
“I don’t think that they (the Europeans) associate or consider Ukraine to be a part of Russia as they perceived some time ago. In my opinion, the association with Russia is primarily related to Russia’s aggression. That’s a logical association as this issue has been one of the main topics of European media for the last year.”
On the subject of Ukraine eventually joining the EU, the French are the most skeptical while, the British are largely indifferent.
In order for Ukraine to create a better image in these countries, political scientist Volodymyr Fesenko told euronews the country “needs to compensate for this with the successful implementation of reforms in the country; the promotion of Ukraine’s history that should be considered as a part of European history. That will increase the percentage of people who will perceive Ukraine as a part of Europe, not only geographically, but also politically and historically.” * **
Oh, and as for this:
The survey will help to identify problems in the EU-Ukraine relations and to bring to light concerns of ordinary Europeans. These findings are strikingly important in terms of Russia's powerful efforts to sow division among European nations fracturing their unity with respect to Ukraine.Europeans can make up their own minds thank you very much. Kremlin propaganda be damned. American propaganda be damned. And what the fuck is this 'unity with respect to Ukraine' of which you speak ? What unity ? Since when ?
Anyways, it's an interesting survey, propaganda or not, and I do love me a nice word-cloud:
Almost thought they'd forgotten Yulia, but no, there she is. They're still missing one important word though: IMF.
* In other words, erase the long history with Russia going all the way back to the Rus' ?
** Bolding mine. Text from the EuroNews site is almost, but not exactly a transcript of the video.
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