So why is gambling illegal nearly everywhere in America, save for Indian Reservations, boats, and Las Vegas, but this is legal?
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Friday, June 11, 2010
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Journalist driven PR?
I hope this serves as a counterpoint to PR driven journalism, but I worry it may help facilitate that very awful thing.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
The Low Bar on Twitter
In an effort to separate my personal political stuff with my personal and professional design stuff, I've created a Twitter account specifically for The Low Bar. If you want to follow me there, look for "thelowbar".
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Blame the Israel people and not just the government?
This sounds plausible, and reasonable:
I get notes all the time from family and friends in Israel. These are generally liberal, secular people. None of them are settlers. None of them vote for Likud, to say nothing of parties further to the right. Overwhelmingly, the sentiment among people I know in Israel was in favor of the Gaza war, in favor of the embargo and blockade, in favor of a policy of collective punishment against the people of Gaza.
The reason is simple. From the perspective not only of the Israeli center but of people who consider themselves basically on the left, though not the far left, when Israel unilaterally left Gaza that meant the Gazans “got what they wanted” and left no basis for continued hostilities. The fact that, after the withdrawal, Hamas rained mortars and rockets down on Israeli territory, proved that Hamas had no “legitimate” political goals but was simply interested in destroying Israel and killing Jews. After that, whatever Gaza got, from their perspective, they had coming to them, and there’s nothing more to say.
[...]
If you think about it, though, it’s not at all hard to “understand” why Hamas launched their rockets. First of all, because they could. Israel was the enemy, fleeing with her tail between her legs. Why should they refrain from shooting? Second, of course they still had grievances. Even from the perspective of the most moderate possible interlocutor on the other side, what Israel “gave” the Palestinians by unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza didn’t remotely satisfy Palestinian grievances. Did Israel actually expect the people of Gaza to say “thank-you?”
Israel Attacked the USS Liberty 43 Years Ago Today
On June 8, 1967, US Navy intelligence ship USS Liberty was suddenly and brutally attacked on the high seas in international waters by the air and naval forces of Israel. The Israeli forces attacked with full knowledge that this was an American ship and lied about it. Survivors have been forbidden for 40 years to tell their story under oath to the American public. The USS Liberty Memorial web site tells their story and is dedicated to the memory of the 34 brave men who died.The cover-up continues to this day.
Monday, June 7, 2010
Israeli IDF are scum
Israel acknowledged Sunday that it edited recordings of what it said were anti-Semitic and anti-American radio calls by pro-Palestinian activists who tried to run the Gaza blockade and that it could not identify the origin of the broadcasts.
The Israeli military released a 26-second recording Friday night in which a warning call to a ship in the flotilla was met with the reply of "Shut up -- go back to Auschwitz." After another voice reports that the convoy has the permission of Palestinian officials to dock in Gaza, a third voice responds, "We are helping Arabs going against the U.S. Don't forget 9/11, guys."
[...]
On the full recording, an Israeli warship hails one of the vessels in the flotilla to warn it was approaching a blockade zone and warned that "all necessary measures" would be taken to prevent it from docking in Gaza. After three warnings, Free Gaza activist Huwaida Arraf replied that the blockade was a violation of international law and that the convoy was carrying only humanitarian aid.
"We do not carry anything that constitutes a threat to your armed forces," she says on the recording.
Let me say this loudly and clearly: FUCK YOU, ISRAEL!*
*Pertains to Zionists, Netanyahu's government, and the IDF
Offensive and Reprehensible
It's pretty fucking sad when even a legend speaks up against Israel, that legend can be toppled.
Helen Thomas announced on Monday that she is retiring, moments after the White House Correspondents Association said it was considering stripping her of her front-row press room seat.I echo Helen Thomas. The Jews have no more right to that land than anyone else in the world. They have it only because they took it, and they did it with US money and military support. Without that, there would be no Israel.The 89-year-old so-called “dean of the White House press corps” had caused an uproar after making remarks in May suggesting that Israeli Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and return to Germany and Poland “or wherever they came from.”
Mr. Gibbs said he had not spoken directly with the president about it. But, he added: “Those remarks were offensive and reprehensible. She should and has apologized. Obviously those remarks do not reflect, certainly, the opinion of I assume most of the people in here, and certainly not of the administration.”I think this Obama administration is offensive and reprehensible. I think the Israeli government and the IDF are offensive and reprehensible. I think my tax dollars going to prop up Israel is offensive and reprehensible.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Thursday, June 3, 2010
America has begun to see Israel more as a burden than an asset
That being declared by the head of Israel's Mossad.
Most telling of all are the stirrings of disquiet in America, Israel’s most steadfast ally. Americans are still vastly more sympathetic to the Israelis than to the Palestinians. But a growing number, especially Democrats, including many liberal Jews, are getting queasier about what they see as America’s too robotic support for Israel, especially when its government is as hawkish as Binyamin Netanyahu’s. A gap in sympathy for Israel has widened between Democrats and Republicans. Conservatives still tend to back Israel through hell and the high seas. Barack Obama is more conscious that the Palestinians’ failure to get a state is helping to spread anti-American poison across the Muslim world, making it harder for him to deal with Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. His generals have strenuously made that point. None other than the head of Israel’s Mossad, its foreign intelligence service, declared this week that America has begun to see Israel more as a burden than an asset.Read the full post here.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
The Israelis apparently do not understand the concept of meta-data in photos.
Idiots. (Click to embiggen.)
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Neutrinos have mass? Uh oh.
That means a whole lot of re-working of the Standard Model. Time to get busy, physicists!
Mind = Blown.
For the first time, physicists have confirmed that certain subatomic particles have mass and that they could account for a large proportion of matter in the universe, the so-called dark matter that astrophysicists know is there but that cannot be observed by conventional means.That's pretty awesome on a fundamental level, but how about these little details?
The finding concerns the behavior of neutrinos, ghost-like particles that travel at the speed of light. In the new experiment, physicists captured a muon neutrino in the process of transforming into a tau neutrino.
Because the neutrino beam that is created is not affected by electrical or magnetic fields, the proton accelerator must be pointed directly at detectors in the laboratory under Gran Sasso mountain 453 miles away in central Italy, between the towns of L'Aquila and Teramo. When neutrinos are produced, they continue in the same direction of the proton beam, arriving at Gran Sasso in 2.4 milliseconds.
The detector at Gran Sasso is a massive apparatus made up of 150,000 "bricks" of photographic film interleaved with lead sheets. The total mass of the bricks, which are accompanied by electronic detectors and other apparatus, is about 1,300 tons.
Mind = Blown.
Monday, May 31, 2010
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