Are you finding your in-box flooded with LinkedIn requests? Some users are sending out the invitations against their will, according to a recent class action complaint. LinkedIn prompts its users to enter their email account, then uses the information to harvest every address from the user’s account.
Dear Roger,
You will need to APOLOGIZE to everyone on your hotmail address list. This includes your family, friends, remote acquaintances, and people who wrote to you so long ago they've forgotten who you are. Keep your apology brief and factual --
Dear Jay,
I am sorry I sent you a spam invitation to connect on LinkedIn. I have done this several times in years past, so I am aware of the problem, but I AM TOO FUCKING STUPID to avoid it. In a week you will receive a follow-up email reminder about the first spam. I am sorry. In two weeks you will receive yet another follow-up email reminder about the first two spams. I am sorry as hell. Really, I am very sorry.
Sincerely,
Roger Idiot Fager
-cousin john
p.s. You have two different Email addresses for me in your contacts list, so I am getting six invitations from you this year. THIS YEAR. This is the third year you have done this, so I have EIGHTEEN SPAMS from you. What a douche you are.
If you aspire to be a couch-potato like me, this is an excellent time to start, since the TV shows in the new fall line-up are unexpectedly strong. To be sure, there are also mediocre ones and, of course, stinkers. But let's start with the good ones.
How to Get Away with Murder - ABC, every bit as good as you thought it would be. Viola Davis and her team lie and cheat and steal and betray anybody they can. In other words, they are lawyers.
Manhattan - period drama, quantum physics in Los Alamos in 1944, often creepy Extant - CBS Spielberg cyborg yarn with Halle Berry, excellent -- well, it's Spielberg Blackish - sitcom with a great cast including Lawrence Fishburne Red Band Society - interesting script & plot in a teen drama Scorpion - smart techno thriller, well written Gotham - batman origin story, everyone is corrupt & detestable Gracepoint - FOX, a strong drama in the David Lynch-ish genre
Stalker - a horror psycho-drama where everybody stalks everybody else, including the lead investigators. Every character is damaged. I like it very well. Let's call it stalker porn.
Who is this person? You may recognize her from the series Nikita 2010-2013. Margaret Denise Quigley is known professionally as Maggie Q. No one knows why. .She is a former fashion model and athlete who stars with Dylan McDermott in Stalker.
Maggie Q is 35 years old, although she appears middle-aged. Her father is of Irish and Polish descent, and her mother Vietnamese. She is fit, slender, even anorexic, seemingly weighing about 85 pounds, which compels us to ask - does she have boobs? Improbably, yes. This is the basic reason we can't stop watching.
Suckiest programs?
There is a steaming heap of millennial couple stories -- Manhattan Love Story, Selfie, A to Z -- all quite shallow, but the primary new show to avoid at all costs is NCIS New Orleans. The acting and plots and script writing are downright childish. It is hard to understand how it can be so much worse than NCIS Los Angeles, which is excellent this year.
I think we were warned about this in the Book of Revelation. Uh, let's see, there was that warning about Pestilence, War, Famine, and -- yeah -- Ratcopters.
When his pet rat died of cancer, Dutch teenager Pepeijn Bruins, 13, decided to memorialize Ratjetoe (Dutch for ratatouille) by attaching its little limbs to a helicopter he had built with the help of two engineers. This disgusting kid gave taxidermy a bad name.
We keep reading about Russian disinformation, which is distorted and bizarre. Some Russian propaganda is not even remotely connected to reality. I learned about it by browsing the StopFake website. You will enjoy
Russia’s Channel One ran a horrific story of an alleged baby crucifixion in Ukraine. The only “witness” to the alleged mind-numbing public execution is Galyna Pyshniak, who was interviewed in Russia.
Her breathless story included the following claims: “Center of the city. Lenin square. Our Gorispolkom is the only square where you could herd all the people. They gathered women, because there are no more men. Women, girls, old people. It was called a show execution. They took a child, 3 years old, a little boy. He was wearing little briefs and a T-shirt and they nailed him, like Jesus, to the bulletin board.”
Out of the entire town of Slavyansk, there is not a single witness who could corroborate this outlandish horror story, which was seemingly “inspired” by the 4th season of the Game of Thrones, which dealt with public crucifixion of 163 children.
Who is buying this? One separatist, a Russian retired military officer, referred to this "story" as a reason for relocating to Ukraine: "the children must be saved!"
A dead child in Slavyansk? - photo of a child killed in Aleppo, Syria, falsely represented to depict a child killed by the Ukrainian military in Slavyansk, Ukraine
There is so much to say about Ferguson. Where do we start? Can we cover it in one post? er, of course not.
Protests
Hundreds of people were marching in the street and carrying signs. That is not news. Democracy has always had protests. James Madison was thinking of protesters 250 years ago when he forbade laws
"abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." (the First Amendment)
Protests are not new. Cairo has had mass protests; Kiev, Dortmund, London, Bangkok, Toronto, Wall Street, all had major demonstrations.
Crowd Control
The real news is that the small Missouri community reacted by sending out SWAT teams with automatic rifles, mine-resistant tanks, helmets, kevlar vests, camo suits, tear gas, rubber bullets, and sound cannons.
And this is why Ferguson became a global news event -- idiot police behavior.
Blame It On The Ghetto
The White ghetto I mean. In the small Missouri community, White people are isolated from people of color and from humanity at large. According to Ferguson mayor James Knowles III, "there's no racial divide in Ferguson," which is of course delusional. As John Oliver points out, "there is no history of racial tension here" has never been true anywhere on earth.
We grew and evolved during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. We changed. We learned to be tolerant, to be just. Voting rights were now guaranteed by law. Discrimination in housing and hiring were prohibited. Finally it seemed that, in the words of Dr. King, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
Pre-Racial America?
Rev. Al Sharpton recently said that Blacks must not be treated as three-fifths of a man. This takes us back to before Jim Crow, to before Civil War politics, to the 18th Century. We all know that racism is a serious problem in this country, but we didn't expect to hear such pre-civil-rights language again. What happened?
Poverty Happened
The financial elite were never concerned with civil rights. It's not a problem at the country club. The working poor do not have time for civil rights. They are working three jobs. The upwardly mobile middle class, well -- they disappeared. The wealth curve has gone from a smooth one-hump camel to a gnarled two-hump camel. It’s all about the “long tails” at the very top and the very bottom now. We’re all tail and no rat.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (yes, the basketball great) has written a thought provoking essay on poverty as a driver of Ferguson.
This fist-shaking of everyone’s racial agenda distracts America from the larger issue that the targets of police overreaction are based less on skin color and more on an even worse affliction: being poor. Of course, to many in America, being a person of color is synonymous with being poor, and being poor is synonymous with being a criminal. Ironically, this misperception is true even among the poor. [ more ]
The internet told me to automate the choices. This seemed like a reasonable idea, except javascript doesn't work in Xanga. I had to place it in a separate page on my server. Click the image below to see the page.
Juan Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan, where he is known as an expert on Middle East issues, frequently interviewed on news shows. His blog has won various awards, including the 2005 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism from Hunter College, and two 2004 Koufax Awards: the "Best Expert Blog" and the "Best Blog Post."
This article is copied from Juan Cole's blog Informed Comment. It was later was reprinted in truthdig.com.
Notice that I have carefully avoided giving my own reaction to his article. Instead, I am asking for your reaction. Please.
The Cruel Jest of American “Humanitarian Aid” to Iraq
by Juan Cole, Aug. 10, 2014
The United States of America has no claim on the language of “humanitarian aid” to Iraq after what it did to that country. It is rather as though Washington should send Meals Ready to Eat to the good people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One is happy that the US has dropped food aid for the Yezidis trapped on a mountain after they escaped the so-called “Islamic State” of self-styled “caliph” Ibrahim. But the US press either has a short memory or is being disingenuous when they talk about a humanitarian mission in Iraq!
The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent 8-year military Occupation of that country caused over one million Iraqis to be displaced abroad, especially to Syria and Jordan, but some of them got to Sweden and a few to the US itself.
Further about 4 million Iraqis were displaced internally. Baghdad underwent an ethnic cleansing of its Sunni Arabs, with the proportion likely falling from 45 percent of the city to 15 percent or so of the city. The “Islamic State” push on the capital in concert with other Sunni Arabs is an attempt to recover what was taken from them by the Bush administration. Likewise, the Sunni Turkmen of Tel Afar under the Americans were ethnically cleansed and the town became largely Shiite. Turkmen Shiites are among the northern ethnic groups now menaced by IS.
The US was the proximate cause of a civil war in 2006-2007 in which at some points as many as 3,000 people were being killed each month.
How many Iraqis died because of the US invasion, i.e. the extra mortality rate, is hard to estimate. But likely it was at least 300,000 persons. Typically wounded in war are three times as many as the killed, so that would give us nearly 1 million wounded. Most of the 300,000 who died were men, many of them with families, and in Iraq there were few or no insurance policies. That left 300,000 or so widows and likely 1.5 million orphans.
“Humanitarian mission” may sound good to American ears. But there is no way a few food drops can make up for what the US did to Iraq.
What do you think? Did professor Cole get it right?
I started reading Mark Twain stories after seeing the excellent Ken Burns biography on PBS. The show is no longer available on PBS, but you can find a version in Youtube [ link ]
I downloaded Huckleberry Finn and various stories and essays in PDF format. There are no copyright issues, since the works are a hundred years old or more. Along the way, I found a PDF file named Classic American Short Stories containing works by Mark Twain, O. Henry, Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, Sherwood Anderson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Bret Harte. You can download it HERE for free.
This anthology contains a unique cross-section of American short stories, written between 1835 and 1919. They span the entire genre, going from simple irony to an exploration of the nature of evil. Many of America's greatest writers are included, and the stylistic and thematic differences among them offer readers a large diversity of plot, theme, setting, and character development.
The sly wit of Mark Twain's country bumpkins in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County is sure to provoke laughter and an appreciation for Twain's uncanny ear for dialect. O. Henry's poverty-stricken couple in The Gift of the Magi experience a twist of fate that only love can bring, and when it occurs on Christmas Eve, it is that much more rewarding. One of Edgar Allan Poe's most famous stories, The Cask of Amontillado, with the murderous insanity of its narrator, the primal fear it arouses, and its ironic humor has enthralled readers for many years. Naturalism and anthropomorphism are important elements in Jack London's To Build a Fire, as the story's foolish Yukon traveler pushes his dog toward their opposite fates after ignoring wiser men's advice.
Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener, filled with ambiguity and uncertainty over the main character's motivation, offers great relevance to modern society's desire for individuality and success in the business world. Stephen Crane's The Open Boat, another realistic tale of survival or death, captivates the imagination by placing readers inside a dingy struggling to survive against the might of the sea. Désirée's Baby, Kate Chopin's story about female independence and the breaking of racial stereotypes, shocked the America of the 1890s, and its characters seem even more relevant in today's more understanding society.
Sherwood Anderson's Hands, with both its directness and its hints at hidden issues, influenced future generations of writers, including Ernest Hemingway, who for a while considered Anderson a mentor. Nathaniel Hawthorne's allegory, Young Goodman Brown, provides a clear depiction of how temptation and wickedness have the potential to overcome basic human goodness. Bret Harte's The Outcasts of Poker Flat, a story of wonderfully diverse characters who simply do not fit into society's expectations and who exhibit both unexpected strengths and surprising weaknesses, rounds out the anthology.
on a hot day I like to
get a popsicle
and slowly peel the wrapping off
then lick it all over
before I take it in my mouth
a little bit at a time
and wrap my lips around
the hard sweet treat
and plunge it deeper
into my mouth . .
sometimes I get
some of the sweet juice
dripping down my chin
and I lap it up
then nibble gently
because I want to make it
last for a long time
So ah . . . it would seem there is a lady sharing her fellatio fantasies with me today . . .
good metaphor, good creativeness. I believe I will reprint this in my blog. Is there anything you would like to add to the blog by way of preface?
just add that I picked up some new panties and his favorite lubricant because he will be here soon and I promised to do ANYTHING he wishes with me.
You could have looked up the lyrics yourself. I saved you the trouble.
(I had to replace the original video, which got copyright-blocked. Too bad, because there were cameos by Aisha Tyler, Margaret Cho, Kristen Schaal, and Eric Stonestreet.)
It might seem crazy, wearing stripes and plaid
I instagram every meal I've had
All my used liquor bottles are on display
We can go to see a show but I'll make you pay
(because I'm tacky) Wear my belt with suspenders and sandals with my socks
(because I'm tacky) Got some new glitter Uggs and lovely pink sequined crocs
(because I'm tacky) Never let you forget some favor I did for you
(because I'm tacky) If you're okay with that, then, you might just be tacky, too
I meet some chick, ask her this and that
Like 'Are you pregnant girl, or just really fat?' (what?)
Well, now I'm dropping names almost constantly
That's what Kanye West keeps telling me, here's why
(because I'm tacky) Wear my Ed Hardy shirt with fluorescent orange pants
(because I'm tacky) Got my new resume it's printed in Comic Sans
(because I'm tacky) Think it's fun threatening waiters with a bad Yelp review
(because I'm tacky) If you think that's just fine, then, you're probably tacky, too
Bring me shame, can't nothing
Bring me shame, I never know why
Bring me shame, can't nothing
Bring me shame, I said
Bring me shame, can't nothing
Bring me shame, it's pointless to try
Bring me shame, can't nothing
Bring me shame, I said
(because I'm tacky) 43 Bumper Stickers and a YOLO license plate
(because I'm tacky) Bring along my coupon book whenever I'm on a date
(because I'm tacky) Practice my twerking moves in line at the DMV
(because I'm tacky) Took the whole bowl of restaurant mints. Hey, it said they're free
(because I'm tacky) I get drunk at the bank And take off my shirt, at least
(because I'm tacky) I would live-tweet a funeral, take selfies with the deceased
(because I'm tacky) If I'm bitten by a zombie, I'm probably not telling you
(because I'm tacky) If you don't think that's bad, guess what, then you're tacky, too
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