The Primary Process Post-Citzens United

I had an interesting thought just now. We're not even at Super Tuesday and yet we've seen 20 debates narrowing down eight candidates to four. There are still FOUR candidates, even now. I'm just speculating here, but I don't remember there being such an insanely long primary battle before this one. Aside from the other factors like the lies and misleading ads Super PACs are saying, they're also keeping candidates in the running for way longer. I mean, any dude with ten million dollars can just up and decide to back their man, they're not losing if they have anything to spend about it.

I wonder when people will start putting two and two together and actually start demanding campaign finance reform through legislation. Sooner would be better than later obviously, but my countrymen always seem to find new and insanely irritating ways to surprise me, so who knows. One thing I am pretty sure of though is people are going to tire of this. It may not be obvious on its face, but there will be a reaction of some kind, be it insanely low turn out at the polls or huge chucks of the vote to go to third party candidates or even direct campaigning nationally to current legislators, anything's possible. But then again, somethings are more likely than others. Time will tell.

Skittles, Your Marketing Department Needs a Raise

This is absolutely brilliant. No major brand has embraced the viral video quite like this, and if it's a trend I hope it explodes in popularity:

The Wrath of Kuma

I was eating at Kuma's corner with three friends, and I was bothered in a way I haven't been in some time. Enough to actually write in this thing about it, since I'm not conceded enough to complain to a friend about my own hangups (at least this one). I hadn't eaten, I was a bit sloshed, and I was served last. A drink I ordered had taken an excessive amount of time, and I bitchily asked our waitress where my drink was. She said she was waiting on the bartender, bitched her out, then gave me my drink.

But when she gave me my drink, it came with a look and a gesture that I've never experienced and hope to never again. It was her dropping the beer onto the table, sliding it towards me, and giving me the most chilling look I've not seen in quite a long time. It was her discarding me as a person, saying nothing but "you have wronged me and I no longer consider you in any way." It was incredibly sincere, I've not seen such an honest expression of emotion in months and it chilled me to the bone. Simply put, I've never been discarded before. Even by an acquaintance, no one has rejected me so completely.

For the rest of the night it was the characteristic cold shoulder 'I am a black hole of scorn' type of service from her. When she eventually looked at me I called her over and apologized for being a bitch to her, but damage done. I'm a big fat pansy for feeling this terrible over a look, but most of the time people are a little two faced... trying to wear a mask, trying to hide one emotion with another, trying to give you what you want to hear and see, but not her. It was pure contempt, unfiltered and unmuddled.

Fascinating.

Butchering Watchmen For The Kiddies

This is the craziest video I've seen regarding the Watchmen. Alan Moore probably span around in his chair from the force of his ears exploding with steam when he watched this.

Staying Under The Radar In Vista x64 - Trickier Than You'd Think

Recently I've been trying to replicate some of the things that I felt made my XP system pretty secure onto my Vista x64 laptop, and I finally got around to (attempting) installing Peergaurdian 2 when I ran into a snag. For anyone who reads this blog (ha) and doesn't know what that is, basically it protects your computer from companies like Mediasentry, you know, one of those watchdog groups that work for the likes of the RIAA and the MPAA, effectively blocking them from seeing your internet traffic based on what IP addresses they use, which is stored in 'blacklists' which are (I think) ultimately updated by the BISS community, who as far as I can gather from their website/forums are just a bunch of people on the net trying to make it secure for those people who want/need it.

So, back to the Peergaurdian, I tried installing it and basically got an error message involving the driver for some reason. So, being inquisitive as I am, I did some web sluething and found out what the deal was. Basically Microsoft, in an attempt to make the OS more 'secure' requires that all of the drivers to have to have a special code signature that is provided by them so that, presumably, some malicious driver doesn't get installed or some such, but I doubt that it actually protects you from much. Normally this wouldn't bother me too much, but given the fact that it has a yearly fee attached to it, I can't say I'm a fan. This is a big reason that Peergaurdian 2 doesn't work on vista, they can't afford the yearly licensing fee. So given that, I wanted to find out how to disable whatever part of the OS checks for the driver signature. The Phoenix labs guys (Peergaurdian creators) have a method of doing this or you can apparently disable the check in the advanced boot menu if you press F8 before windows starts loading, but the latter method is only for the one session so you would have to do this everytime you wanted to boot up Vista and use Peergaurdian.

Enter ReadyDriver Plus. Apparently someone made a program, a mod of the program ReadyDriver, which installs itself onto your hard drive and, as far as I can gather, alters the windows vista bootloader to disable the check for your drivers by default. I haven't used it yet, but if do I'll post about any unwanted side effects I notice after the install. I'm probably just going to use the PeerGaurdian method posted on their RC1 download page, but I just wanted to make note of this program in case there's another program which uses unsigned drivers.

Now that I had found all of this out, I realized that if I wanted to dual boot operating systems that I couldn't use that program and boot from GRUB, since it wouldn't use the vista boot loader at all. That means I would need to find a way to boot linux through the windows boot loader, and luckily I found a way here.

So I suppose to sum up this whole post, vista is a freaking hassle.

Racism in Ohio, Political Style

Holy motherless son of a crap, apparently Al-Jazeera was at a Palin/McCain rally in Ohio and they did a piece about, I don't know, racism? Basically this is all tied to the comment Obama made during the third debate where he said how people at McCain's rallies have been heard shouting things like "terrorist" and "kill him" after his name is mentioned and the lack of addressing this by the McCain campaign, and this video kinda corroborates that claim. Actually, it really corroborates that claim. I'm not deluded enough to think that this is how all people in Ohio or all conservatives or whatever think, but it confirms the existence of some extremely nasty racism in parts of America, and it makes me cringe to think that people have clung to such backwards beliefs for so long.

McDonalds, Apparently Not Really Even Food

So I was wandering the web like I always do when I came across the picture above. It's a picture of a McDonald's Hamburger that's 12 years old. I never really knew how little food there was in McDonald's cooking, because even if you left that in the fridge for that long something would have started to grow on in, something from the air, something from the water, something from the meat or bread, ANYTHING. Bacteria is freaking everywhere, and yet here this burger is, clean and neat just like the day it was bought. I'm a little frightened by this burger, despite the fact that I don't even eat the stuff.

1996 McDonalds Hamburger

My Bloody Valentine, Only Shallow

Okay, so I know I'm a little late to the party but holy crap is My Bloody Valentine freaking amazing. I finally watched this video and read their wikipedia article, and man their story and last album (not for long though!) are so insanely beautiful, I can't even believe that I claimed to like shoegazey music before getting into this band as hard as I am right now. The noise and soft vocals are such a great contrast yet they compliment each other, it's so great to listen to. Watch the video, see for yourself how great this band is.



My Bloody Valentine

If Charles Darwin Were Alive, I'd Give Him A Big'ol High Five

Well well well, look who's got egg on their face 150 years later. Well, I shouldn't poke fun, but I have to admit this is a very satisfying article. Essentially the article says that the Catholic Church now acknowledges Darwin's theory of evolution is compatible with the Bible. Score one for Biologists and people who are educated properly everywhere! An excerpt from the article:

The Catholic Church teaches "theistic evolution," a stand that accepts evolution as a scientific theory and sees no reason why God could not have used a natural evolutionary process in the forming of the human species.

It objects to using evolution as the basis for an atheist philosophy that denies God's existence or any divine role in creation. It also objects to using Genesis as a scientific text.

As Ravasi put it, creationism belongs to the "strictly theological sphere" and could not be used "ideologically in science."

Well, now I suppose Creationists have even more opposition to their views. Yah know, other than most of the rest of the global Christian population that thinks Creationism and Intelligent Design being taught in schools is pretty ridiculous.

Vatican: Guess what, Darwin? Evolution is OK

NOW, Thanks for actually keeping women's Interests in mind and not bein' fools about it

NOW, the National Organization for Women, endorsed Senator Barack Obama for president recently. I... I'm just so happy right now, as, irrational as it may seem, this feels to me to be an omen of sorts, that McCain's 'Palin boost' is really all hype and when you line the two candidates beside one another, the most intelligent people I've met or heard endorse Barack. It offers hope that the Democrats, despite their terrible missteps in the better part of the past decade, may just win back the executive and just maybe we actually may see changes in how the government is run, since I really doubt that the man who has gone back on some of his most fierce beliefs is going to resist his party's influence if he were president.

National Organization for Women PAC Endorses Obama-Biden

'Hillary's women' reject McCain's VP choice

And just for fun, let's link to a 'why Obama's better' story:
Why Obama's Health Plan Is Better

Joe Rogan, now officially the motherfucking man

Oh lordy lord, have I got an amazing blog post for you. It's from Joe Rogan's blog, and it's called "Porno Party," and yes, it's as hilarious and interesting as it sounds. Basically Joe doesn't really like going to parties because he rarely finds people who are interesting to talk to at them, but likes them for the crazy crap that could possibly happen and the stories he could tell because of them. So when he gets invited to the "Porno Party" he can't resist, especially because a group of his friends are going with him. When he arrives, he sees an empty parking lot and forty chairs filled with dudes watching a porn flick, which doesn't seem too interesting until the movie stops and a director steps out. Apparently this is a screening, and the flick that was just on was just a warm up or some such. So the movie starts, and it seems fairly run of the mill, until the actress (yes, the one getting rammed on screen) shows up. What happens next is rediculous, and has already made my day. Read the post to find out what happened, and then immediately thereafter laugh your ass off. Obviously this one isn't for the kiddies, but do yourself a favor and don't scroll to the bottom of the page until you read the whole story. It's like the icing on the freaking glorious cake.

"Porno Party"

Anatoli Bugorski, Fucking Invincible

Holy crap, I had no idea who this guy was until I read his wikipedia article:

"As a researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, Bugorski used to work with the largest Soviet particle accelerator, the synchrotron U-70. On July 13, 1978, Bugorski was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment when an accident occurred due to failed safety mechanisms. Bugorski was leaning over the piece of equipment when he stuck his head in the part through which the proton beam was running. Reportedly, he saw a flash "brighter than a thousand suns", but did not feel any pain. The beam measured about 2000 gray when it entered Bugorski's skull, and about 3000 gray when it exited after colliding with the inside of his head."

If anyone ever made a crack about looking bad or something, he always had an ace in the hole! "Well let's see you have a proton beam shot through your skull and we'll see how good you look." That guy is just great if you ask me. I mean, how can you be a bad person if you've actually seen a proton?

Anatoli Bugorski

She & Him, "Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?"

Zooey Deschanel, I heart you SO hard.

Iraq cancels six no-bid oil contracts

This just makes me so happy;

"Iraq's oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, told reporters at an OPEC summit meeting in Vienna on Tuesday that talks with Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, Total, BP and several smaller companies for one-year deals, which were announced in June and subsequently delayed, had dragged on for so long that the companies could not now fulfill the work within that time frame. The companies confirmed on Wednesday that the deals had been canceled."

Hazaa for the Iraqis! Stand up for your country and don't be corrupt American puppets, otherwise we may have another Saddam in like 40 years. Seriously, I hope the new administration revises their foreign policy and just stops meddling in affairs which have nothing to do with us.

Iraq cancels six no-bid oil contracts

Just When I Thought The Internet Couldn't BLOW My Mind Once Again

www.cakefarts.com

BLOW YOUR FREAKING MIND

Male Homosexuality: Side Effect of Female Evolution?

So I personally love evolution, it was one of the first scientific concepts that fascinated me as a kid and it still intrigues me just as much to this day. There was one thing about the theory and human behavior that I never thought added up though, and that was homosexuality. Basically, if Evolution by means of natural selection was the way it all went down, then why wasn't homosexuality just rubbed out of behavior in general earlier on since homosexuals couldn't have kids? I never could answer that question, and it has bugged me and more than likely countless others for the longest time. That is, until I read this article reviewing a recent paper which was published on the matter.

The long and short of it is, male sexuality, at least according to the statistical analysis done in the paper, is linked to female relatives on the mother's side having a larger than average number of children. This is hypothesized to act as a buffer against extinction, since in the event of a dip in the population these women will just let their loins burst with children, possibly because their attraction towards men is stronger than the attraction felt by other women. An apparent byproduct of this is that males who are the offspring of these females will carry the same genetic trait, and thus be more inclined to fancy the boys rather than the gals. Taken from the article:

"...if the authors are correct, we're not really talking about genes for homosexuality. We're talking about genes for "androphilia," i.e., attraction to men. The importance of the genes lies in what they do not to men but to women, by increasing reproductive output so powerfully that these women compensate for the reduced output among their male relatives. You can't isolate gay men as a puzzle or problem anymore. You have to see them as part of a bigger, stronger, enduring phenomenon."

I love the fact that the whole experiment is based on analysis of breeding data that was already there for anyone to look at and the primary investigator just took a fresh approach to it. It actually kind of reminds me of Mendel's peas, you know that little experiment which is widely accepted as the forerunner to all of genetics? It makes me feel good that the model that he began is still being used to this day, albeit with slightly more advanced statistical techniques, but still, ya gotta love Mendel. Anywho, read the article, it's nice and it clears up (at least in my mind) the debate whether Homosexuality is genetic or cultural.


Sexual Antagonism - A genetic theory of homosexuality.

Al Leong, I Salute You

Do you remember that guy who was in all kinds of action movies in the past who was always a bad guy (except for his bitchin' sweet facial hair, there's no way a Fu Manchu can be evil) and always ended up dieing in the end? Well I do, and it always bugged me that I saw him in dozens of movies but never knew who he was, so I looked him up on IMDB, and then on wikipedia. Apparently his name is Al Leong and has a huge cult following exactly because of his showing up in crap loads of action movies and just exuding bad guyness (and of course, that glorious stash). And so Al Leong, I salute you.

Iraq was premeditated!? Cheney and Rove were pulling the strings!? *GASP*

2004 CBS 60 Minutes Interview:

Scott McClellan, I owe you a beer

This guy's a class act in my book. This man was a part of the Bush administration and was told to tell the American people everything that the administration wanted them to know, and when he either found out or simply suspected that the administration wasn't on the level he did something about it. He wrote a book about his experiences in the administration, pointing out all of his suspicions and the questionable circumstances he witnessed as the White House press secretary and then talked about it in front of a Congressional committee, something that no senior level official in the Bush Administration has been willing to do and for which McClellan is taking all kinds of flack and criticism. So good for you, Mr. McClellan, for standing up for what you believe and speaking up in front of all of your former coworkers and friends, you're a real patriot.

I just hope that the talk of impeachment I saw from Congressman Wexler in the video linked below from the post by The Raw Story goes somewhere and isn't simply something that becomes empty rhetoric that never sees the House floor. Get your head out of your ass Pelosi and friends and realize that impeaching Bush would be one of the best moves the Democrats could make, as well as punishing a clearly corrupt and incompetant executive leadership that needs to be punished in order for this to never happen again.


Dem Rep. calls for impeachment at McClellan testimony: video

Quite Possibly The Best NERF Office War Ever

Good god man, this is the office war to end all office wars. With the largest array of NERF guns I've ever seen anywhere outside of a toy store, this is packed with foam dart pwnage and is so freaking awesome.


http://view.break.com/521743 - Watch more free videos