Religious search engines filter results to weed out temptations

A number of new Internet search engines created by Christian, Jewish or Muslim entities aim to filter out queries from Web users in a way that is more relevant to those users and keeps them from temptation, alcohol and pornography.

If one types the world alcohol into imhalal.com, the search engine produces results that explain the Muslim viewpoint on drinking. Type in “pornography,” and the search engine produces… nothing.

Hey, I’m all for avoiding that which makes you uncomfortable, but this is sorta silly. Instead of confronting the world as it exists, these people want to live in a state of unreality. Which, I guess, defines the whole religion thing anyway. Sad.

TSA Secure Flight: The Next TSA Privacy Threat?

If you ever intend to fly again, you will encounter yet another Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program that will be administered by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to ascertain you are not a terrorist. The Secure Flight program requires airlines to collect and transmit each passenger’s full name, date of birth and gender at least 72 hours before a flight. Secure Flight may be aimed at making flying safer, but there is already a report that the TSA Secure Flight initiative may be making your privacy less secure.

American Airlines may be the first to require all passengers to have Secure Flight Passenger Data (SFPD) in their reservation at least 72 hours prior to departure, but they won’t be the only airline with these requirements. According to KDS, an international provider of Travel & Expense management systems, after November 1, 2010, “any airline failing to comply with the Secure Flight program risks a financial penalty.”

More meddling from the incompetents. Security kabuki yet again.

FCC Expected To Approve White Spaces

After lying dormant for more than two years, the idea of using so-called “white spaces” spectrum for a sort of free universal broadband access is likely to be approved by the FCC at its September 23 meeting, but actual implementation of the Wi-Fi complementary technology will likely remain in limbo.

Because white spaces technology can deliver broadband access free of charge, the phenomenon opens up the possibility of using it to provide service to underserved individuals, many of whom can’t afford to pay for existing broadband access. The Rice University researchers have worked with a Houston nonprofit organization called Technology for All that provides Wi-Fi access in a working class neighborhood in Houston. The researchers have been testing various wireless platforms and custom-built mobile phones in the neighborhood.

Cool.

South Carolina Republicans Have Fun Slavery Dress-Up Party

The National Federation of Republican Women had a board-of-directors meeting in South Carolina over the weekend. Which means that it was the perfect opportunity to have a cocktail party called “A Southern Experience” at the Charleston Country Club, complete with two black people hired to play slaves or something and pose with guests. As you can see above, S.C. Senate President Glenn McConnell likes to dress up as a Confederate general all the time, so he couldn’t help himself and decided not to wear cocktail attire (not of this century anyway). Oh, by the way, we looked at the brochure for this meeting. This party also featured a “live auction.” Jesus Christ.

Words fail.

No, this isn’t another Kid Rock story…

U.S. Meat Farmers Brace for Limits on Antibiotics

Dispensing antibiotics to healthy animals is routine on the large, concentrated farms that now dominate American agriculture. But the practice is increasingly condemned by medical experts who say it contributes to a growing scourge of modern medicine: the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, including dangerous E. coli strains that account for millions of bladder infections each year, as well as resistant types of salmonella and other microbes.

Now, after decades of debate, the Food and Drug Administration appears poised to issue its strongest guidelines on animal antibiotics yet, intended to reduce what it calls a clear risk to human health. They would end farm uses of the drugs simply to promote faster animal growth and call for tighter oversight by veterinarians.

The effects of stuffing factory farmed animals full of drugs to grow faster and to counteract the perils of cramming large amounts of shitting animals together in too small a place are disgusting, dangerous and ruining our bodies immune systems.

Eat grass fed meat from local growers, and avoid this crap altogether.

Bullied Greensburg student takes his own life

Greensburg, Ind. — He was a teenager who didn’t quite fit in. His classmates said Billy Lucas was bullied for being different.

“We’re discussing where we are going. Where we are looking to establish a committee,” said Principal Chapple.

Ooh…a committee. Boy, that’s gonna show those kids, eh? How about locking up the principal, the bullies parents, and the fucking piece of shit kids who hounded this child to death, for conspiracy to commit manslaughter?

The kids who did this are going to wake up everyday to the knowledge that they helped snuff out a life.

And some of them are going to be proud of it.

Do Not Pity the Democrats
By Chris Hedges

There are no longer any major institutions in American society, including the press, the educational system, the financial sector, labor unions, the arts, religious institutions and our dysfunctional political parties, which can be considered democratic. The intent, design and function of these institutions, controlled by corporate money, are to bolster the hierarchical and anti-democratic power of the corporate state. These institutions, often mouthing liberal values, abet and perpetuate mounting inequality. They operate increasingly in secrecy. They ignore suffering or sacrifice human lives for profit. They control and manipulate all levers of power and mass communication. They have muzzled the voices and concerns of citizens. They use entertainment, celebrity gossip and emotionally laden public-relations lies to seduce us into believing in a Disneyworld fantasy of democracy.

We do not have much time left. And the longer we refuse to confront corporate power the more impotent we become as society breaks down. The game of electoral politics, which is given legitimacy by the right and the so-called left on the cable news shows, is just that—a game. It diverts us from what should be our daily task—dismantling, piece by piece, the iron grip that corporations hold over our lives. Hope is a word that is applicable only to those who grasp reality, however bleak, and do something meaningful to fight back—which does not include the farce of elections and involvement in mainstream political parties. Hope is about fighting against the real forces of destruction, not chanting “Yes We Can!” in rallies orchestrated by marketing experts, television crews, pollsters and propagandists or begging Obama to be Obama. Hope, in the hands of realists, spreads fear into the black heart of the corporate elite. But hope, real hope, remains thwarted by our collective self-delusion.

Indeed. I have voted for the last time for any candidate who manages to get their name printed on a ballot.

Fight the power. Fight the powers that be.
Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps

Finished reading Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman this weekend, very moving. And enraging.

Stanley McChrystal should be in jail.

Reading from a polished script, Palin opened the show in her now familiar Minnesota twang. She referenced meeting Beck in New York in the shadow of Lady Liberty — a monument given to the United State by France, she said, as “a gift to warn us against socialism.”

No, you brainless git, it wasn’t:

“Liberty Enlightening the World” was a gift of friendship from the people of France to the United States to commemorate the 100th anniversary of American independence.

If she had her way, I imagine this would be sandblasted off the base:

“Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Few things in life anger me more than having someone think I’m stupid enough to believe any nonsense they jabber out, uncritically. The entire world is not the cozy confines of Faux Noise/Facebook land, Gov. Half Term…a fact you’ll discover if you’re ever vain and ill-advised enough to actually run for office again.

Nitwit.

Joe Biden on The Colbert Report:

“After my son returned after a year in Iraq, I watched at the coming home ceremony. And I watched his three-year-old son on his shoulders grab onto his head and would not let him go and his daughter hanging on his leg and I felt almost guilty because in my home state of Dover [sic], the 5,686 fallen angels who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan came through that mortuary,” he said. “And here I was within two miles of there bringing my son home, welcoming him.

Charles Starkweather, serial killer:

“One thing about dead people, they’re all the same.”

The definition of a sociopath includes the following:

no sense of responsibility
lack of moral sense
lack of guilt
self-centeredness

Joe Biden felt almost guilty when brought uncomfortably close to the reality of his role in the American slaughter machine.

Almost.

These are the words of sociopaths. People with personality disorders so severe they are unable to feel empathy for others, who avoid responsibility for their actions, and lack a moral sense.

You know, that moral sense that tells actual human beings that sending other peoples kids off to die for a lie is the ultimate evil a man can do. All those other peoples kids, they were expendable. They were the meat of American Exceptionalism that gets ground into the USA bullshit sausage. As the serial killer of the Badlands uttered, “Dead people, they’re all the same.”

Joe Biden would understand those words. He lives those words. As long as his child returned home to his family, healthy, not with traumatic brain injuries, not facing foreclosure and the desperation caused by our gutted economy…no, as long as Joe’s kid was ok, that was all that mattered to our Vice President.

He felt almost guilty. Charlie Starkweather would understand that. Because he and Biden? They ain’t that different. Its only a matter of scale.