Daily Blend: 05/06/13

Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski

I’m too bored/lazy/busy reading/excited about tomorrow/tired from “work” to blog much, so here’re some links.

US Air Force officer ^[pictured] in charge of responding to sexual assaults arrested for drunken sexual assault, underlines the US Military’s generally appalling handling of sex crimes.

“Good Riddance: Fox Cancels Long-Running, Drug War-Glorifying, Abuse-Excusing Reality Series COPS”
(via @AndrewKirell; RT: @radleybalko)

Those who slime together, stay together: Anti-Freethought Blogs/Atheism Plus hater encourages Westboro Baptist Church to picket upcoming Women in Secularism conference.
(via Pharyngula)

And finally, how much do you know about science and religion? (I scored in the 15^th and 13^th percentiles, respectively. Which is probably more of an implicit condemnation of the US educational system than anything else.)
(via Bad Astronomy)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

My art blog: Introducing Creativitas!

If I’ve been quieter than usual this week, the reason is I’ve been spending every day planning, designing and coding (and coding, and coding, and …) a brand-new website that I’m now – finally – ready to unveil. You might remember the false start I had ’round last Christmastime when I tried to set up a separate art blog to try and keep my creative works from being tainted by all my inflammatory political rhetoric (heh). Well, I’ve now gone ahead and finished the job.

Now presenting:

Creativitas

(It took me an inordinately long time to come up with such an obvious name.)

All my music, stories and art has already been ported over there and backdated to their original publication dates, here. I’ll now be replacing their instances here with redirects (rather than deleting them outright, which would screw up links and post counts and other details). From now on, the only time I’ll be mentioning my creative works here is to post the occasional notice whenever I’ve updated something over on Creativitas.

So … that’s about it, then. Off you go, and don’t be afraid to sate my hunger for yummy, nourishing feedback. (Pretty please?)

---

UPDATE: 04/20/13 1:42 AM ET —

Finished. All posts here have been redirected and their comments closed.

Musical revisionism incoming

An unexpected opportunity regarding my musical works that I may or may not be at liberty to discuss at some point in the near future may have presented itself recently. As such, I am now entering my usual routine of rushing to revise and revamp my songs in preparation, updating them with improved sounds and other various tweaks. As a result, this means you may perhaps expect a higher number of bumped musical posts on this here blog for the foreseeable future.

That is all.

Man, do I rock this cryptic talk stuff or what.

Daily Blend: 03/26/13

Gov. Jack Dalrymple (R-ND)

Applying for an internship/apprenticeship/something at a ranch tomorrow! Wish me luck. (Or a broken leg. However it goes these days.)

North Dakota Gov. Dalrymple (R) ^[pictured] signs law banning abortion at six weeks, presumably planning emergency fund for inevitable court loss. Wonder if he’ll also enact the even worse “personhood” law.
(via @BreakingNews)

Berlin-based company confirms their “atheist”-branded packages take significantly longer to reach their destinations, when they don’t go missing altogether. Looks like the US Postal Service has some explaining to do.

Oh, look, it’s another boilerplate, evidence-free diatribe about how “[m]ilitant atheism has become a religion”. (Hemant Mehta tears it apart, as does PZ Myers.)
(via @religionnews)

Vox Day: Egalitarians are “inferior beings” (because some of them sometimes make crude jokes on the Internet).

And finally, here’s the trippiest damn water spiral you’ll’ve ever did seen (more info here):

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Blend: Tuesday, January 29, 2013

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Good: Federal judge stops DEA’s attempt to seize a rural Massachusetts motel after a few guests there committed crimes without the motel owner’s knowledge. ^[pictured]
(via Uzza)

PZ Myers handily dismantles the tired anti-abortionist claim that science proves that personhood begins at conception.

Meanwhile, the anti-abortion fetal “heartbeat bill” makes it to Arkansas.

Creeping Creationism in Missouri.

Ray Comfort: Surgeons can’t reconstruct chimp attack victim’s face, ergo, Evolution is dummy-dumb-dumb.

I’m 96% humanist! Take that, 2009 Humanist of the Year PZ Myers and your paltry 90%!

And finally, here’s a bunch of Christians I could have a drink with (if I drank):
(via Joe. My. God.)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

I don’t want any cake for my birthday

My birthday present

I don’t really care for cake, to be honest. I will take some fine Italian food, though, ’cause that’s what I’ll be enjoying as we celebrate the fact that I am now legally allowed to get wasted on a park bench. (Or would be, were I an American. I’ve actually been allowed to do that for three years, now.)

I do expect lots of presents, though! (Seriously, a new colander would be hot. Freaking sticky noodles.)

Remedial cuteness for a dreary day

It’s another tired and uninspired day for me spent trudging through revisions for my novel, so no blogging for now. Instead, have some cute cuddly foxies:

Doesn’t that make everything better?

(via @EmergencyPuppy)

Happy (U.S.) Day for the Giving of the Thanks

As much as I try to avoid arbitrarily predetermined dates to remind us to celebrate that which we have all year to be thankful for, Preliatorite Uzza offers an (un)prayer we can all cheer to. She should try her hand at poetry, that one.

Me, I’m just thankful I finally got my music program working this week after a few months on hiatus, not to mention I’ve managed to unlock a veritable instrumental buffet of new sounds for my songs. Yes, that does explain why blogging has been – and will remain – light this week, and presumably for a while. Music comes first for me, kids, and that’s just the way it is.

As for the rest of you (specifically, you Yanks), eat all the stuffing you can to make up for the corn-dogs I’m planning to have tonight, try not to strangle any Fox News-addicted relatives, and please, above all, make sure that turkey is actually dead – and that it isn’t from Transylvania. (You never know.)

Daily Blend: Monday, October 15, 2012

My new baby

I’m finally the owner of a laptop that isn’t brought to its knees by launching MS Paint. Goodbye, Acer Aspire One – hello, Lenovo ThinkPad T410 ^[pictured]!

The enemy of Romney’s enemy is his friend, until they become his enemy, before they re-become his friend.

How good is your color vision? Take this test to find out. (I got a 7 – relatively sure my monitor screwed me …)
(via @jennifurret)

In which Cracked.com points out that snipers are math prodigies and submarine fights are won by boring the enemy to death (contra what Hollywood would have you believe).

And finally, how could anyone possibly think the far-Right is a refuge for bigoted assholes? Just ask anti-abortion crackpot Randall Terry:

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Blend: Wednesday, October 10, 2012

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So it turns out that little shake I tweeted about last night actually was a 4.5 quake that hit the region. ^[pictured] It’s only the second earthquake I remember feeling. The important thing is everyone’s okay ^[pictured].

Newsweek derps again, publishes doctor’s typical “experience with the afterlife” as proof that “heaven is real”. Rational thinkers everywhere facepalm.

Swedish school lunch lady ordered to make her food less good to avoid making students at other schools jealous. Because that’s the real problem – cafeteria food that’s too tasty.
(via @RadleyBalko)

PETA attacks Pokémon for encouraging animal cruelty (!), succeed in “wast[ing] everybody’s time while simultaneously proving [they] don’t know what the hell [they]’re talking about. Again”.

And finally, Cracked.com reveals a few key details that were (in)conveniently left out of big news stories. (Spoilers: Vioxx is awesome and Hooker Chemical is an innocent scapegoat.)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Blend: Sunday, August 19, 2012 – I’m back!

I haz returned! Sadly, I do not come bearing gifts, if only because of pesky laws of physics making it astonishingly difficult to transmit physical objects through computer screens. But I do have a few links I was able to save up over the last week, along with a few individual posts I’m saving up for a little later, so enjoy:

I know insurance companies are assholes, but it takes a special kind of soullessness to defend in court a man who killed a woman after running a red light to try and avoid paying her full insurance policy. Fuck you forever indeed, Progressive. ^[pictured]
(via @pattonoswalt; RT: @ebertchicago)

Fitting: Christian revisionist David Barton will re-release his bullshit-ridden and recently yanked book The Jefferson Lies through Glenn Beck’s publishing company.

Former Michigan assistant AG Andrew Shirvell finally ordered to pay damages for his ludicrously bigoted campaign against gay U-M student body president Chris Armstrong.
(via Wonkette)

In which top geek John Scalzi encounters the bottomless pit of charm and entertainment that is Vox Day.

Awesomeness: A brand-new (ie. less-than-three-year-old) Martian impact crater.

And finally, those sounds you just heard were Bill Donohue, Pam Geller and other Islamophobes popping a few aneurysms:

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Tags: Progressive • insurance companies • Matt Fisher • Katie Fisher • David Barton • The Jefferson Lies • Mercury Ink • Christian dominionism • Christian nationalism • U.S. Founding Fathers • Thomas Jefferson • Thomas Nelson • Andrew Shirvell • Chris Armstrong • University of Michigan • homophobia • Chris Armstrong • Chris Armstrong Watch • Vox Day • Theodore Beale • John Scalzi • misogyny • Mars • impact events • Ramadan • Islam • Muslims • Empire State Building

On vacation for a few days (fortuitous airline screw-up edition)

So, here’s how the last ten hours or so went down:

Yesterday afternoon. Friend tries to use PayPal to pay for Delta airline tickets to fly over for a visit.

Delta gives him some generic “transfer could not be processed” error. No tickets.

Friend checks his PayPal balance. Payment went through. Still no tickets on Delta’s end.

Cue frantic and increasingly irate phone-calls to typically useless customer service representatives. Arrive at a stalemate.

Skip forward to 3:30 AM (1.5 hours ago at this writing). Friend receives email from Delta: Payment finally, very belatedly, went through. He has tickets.

Departure set for 6:40 AM. Today.

Looks at the time.

Cue maniacal laughter.

So, yeah. From today ’til Sunday the 19^th, consider me temporarily AWOL. (Or whatever the version with official leave is.) Some blogging may still take place, but don’t count on it. I’ll mostly be active on Twitter (to some extent) and saving up more important links for when I return.

Arrivederci!

(The Preliator 2012 Survey is still live, however. I’ve already received more responses than last year’s sad little 12, so wouldn’t it be so totally awesome if you fine folks saw fit to welcome me back in a week’s time with another response or two to finally push it over 2010’s record?)

Daily Blend: Saturday, July 21, 2012

Now a yearling!

Off to the Loto-Québec fireworks. No pics for you! (Because I’m lazy. And my shots make photographers want to hunt me down.)

The only reaction to the Aurora, Colorado shooting worth reading.

Happy birthday to Freethought Blogs ^[pictured]! May there be many more years of vitriolic muckraking ahead.

And finally, today’s offering from our Feline Overlords: Meowbify.
(via Pharyngula)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Tags: fireworks • Loto-Québec • Aurora, CO • Aurora, CO shooting • mass shootings • Patrick from Popehat • medical school • Freethought Blogs • FtB • FTBullies • atheists • Meowbify • cats

Pathetic bigoted owner of horrible little blog doesn’t heart me

So, a couple days ago in my next-to-last post, I wrote about a (now-confirmed faked – more below) screenshot of a sexist comment supposedly written by Penn Jillette, a picture that I casually noted was traced back to some random pothole of sexist idiocy that featured it in a post without attribution or further comment. Well, it seems that said pothole’s owner, Geoffrey Falk, is quite peeved at me for dubbing his bigoted cesspit a “horrible little blog” (which he misread as “terrible”) and really wants everyone to know that he’s totally more popular and awesome than little ol’ moi:

If you missed it yesterday, this “terrible little blog” got pointed to by a “liberal skeptic” out in Baboolie-land … one who foolishly thinks that Ophelia Benson is a “brave woman,” no less.

The same liberal skeptic is “stuck in a rut in Québec [diacritical mark = native French-speaker],” while the author of this “terrible little blog” has written a book which is on Sam Harris’s current reading list.

The same liberal skeptic spends his time “composing, writing, drawing,” but has he created anything even one-tenth as good as my CD, or my EscalatorGate play?

The same liberal skeptic harbors “a layman’s passion for science and technology,” while I work full-time in I.T. as a software developer, averaging around $45/hr.—the fair-market value for my wide range of skills, from hard-core coding to client-facing requirements gathering and technical document creation for sign-off.

The same liberal skeptic “get[s] angry at social injustice,” and detests the libertarianism of Penn Jillette.

Okay, I can’t be the only one who laughed out loud reading that. I’ve seen silly attempts at self-aggrandizement before, but this is just a marvel of its own. When most people realize they have nothing more than ad populum to stand on, they at least have the sense (minimal as it is) to try and make their point about something. All this guy does is trumpet how he’s got a book that some other dude plans to read and how he’s conjured up a CD and found some website willing to sell it. Oh, and he’s got a job in I.T., which I’m sure makes total sense as a rebuttal to what I said – or my little bio – in that Bizarro World of his. He doesn’t even try to critique any of my works (not that they’re stellar, mind you), much less my arguments, which would at least give some hint of credence to all this hilarious posturing.

But the best is the rest:

Gene Burmington | An Open Letter To Dave Vara

The following is a guest post by Gene Burmington.

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Davy Vara [source]

I'm noticing a great deal of drama on this blog due to your misunderstanding of very elementary materials. What makes your claims illegitimate is that Mr. McKen has been running the blog the same way for years, and it can be argued that he is ultimately doing a good job with it, as he hasn't received any other complaints from others that he quoted from.

Given the grand cosmological odds of the internet, you'd think that if Joé were doing something wrong or dishonest, he would have been caught by now, but no. Perhaps you think blogs must follow the scholarly edict that requires a great deal more citation for a work, but for such strictly casual purposes as these, no serious authentication is required.

In McKen's second response to your further threats of litigation, he is more than reasonable to elaborate all that he has done to outline fair use and give an author all credit needed as per the free use statutes of the internet. Despite your bold claims and those of your legal representative, McKen is not "stealing" any of your work. Quoted in context, it is very clear that he didn't write or take responsibility as the originator of those words. Imagine for a second, sir, how tedious it would become if Joé had to place your name right under every single quotation, as is required of other, more formal works.

I do not know what the typical traffic is that your articles receive on average, but I'm sure it's more than a fair assumption that some of views your article received came from the reference in Joé's post. I personally went to read your article after I found it referenced on this blog. People following Joé often follow the hyperlinks he provides so that they may see the author's original words for themselves.

In regards to your accusation of libel, you present a contradiction. How can there be libel against you if you claim not to be represented in the article? That is a fair bit absurd. Sir, you cannot have it both ways. Either there is clear indication that you are being directly targeted with false accusations, or there is no such mention. Furthermore, exactly how are you being libeled, seeing as Joé makes no mention of you in his post? All he expressed was his remarkable distaste for the behavior of the police officers mentioned in your article, not yourself.

Lastly, I am fairly in agreement with Mr. McKen with regards to your legal help. As in, they aren't. Whatever silly ideas your paralegal representative has filled you with, he is either ignorant of common-use laws, or he is simply arrogant, if he thinks he can find a loophole in that mess that is your plagiarism fantasy.

Tags: Davy Vara • cease and desist • copyright law • Fair Use • Fair Dealing • Mick the Attorney • libel • plagiarism

Davy Vara (and his lawyer) still don’t understand Fair Use

Davy Vara [source]

Here we go again. Barely a day after I wrote about an egregiously dumb copyright claim sent to me by Davy Vara, a contributor at police monitoring site Cop Block and who’s apparently quite peeved that I dared to quote from his article for my own post, the man appears and responds thus:

Email from my attorney regarding people copying and pasting my work and passing it off as their own.

Davy, if your work is copywritten, and it is, then you and only you as the original author of said work, has the right to go forward with a notice to cease and desist any and all work which you see someone use and, as is the case here, the person(s) who have copied your work have failed to give you proper credit and/or acknowledgement to you as the original author.

Let me know how you wish to proceed and make sure that whereever you see your work being used in a way where your name has been intentionally excluded, then write down the name of whoever posted it and the website where you saw it and we will proceed accordingly with litigation against those individuals... not only the person who posted it but the website they posted it on.

Mick

Followed by this:

Again, you copied and pasted my exact article, yet intentionally left out my name so as to pass article off as yours. You can say what you want. And your refusal to either give me credit for the article that I wrote and you copied and pasted, or take the article down. Your intentions have been documented and forwarded to my attorney. In the future, so you can avoid litigation, write your own pieces, or have the respect to acknowledge that it is someone else's article and not yours.

Should I be questioning my ability to explain myself at this point? No, really, I mean it. (Or almost.) I made it beyond clear how and why A) I have done nothing wrong, B) I fully attributed his post to him via a hyperlink, as is required under the U.S. Fair Use/Canadian Fair Dealing doctrines (I even made sure to check them both, not knowing which might be applicable given my being a Canuck), and C) he has absolutely no credible legal basis for any of his claims against me (which even included that I had committed “libel actions” against him, despite not mentioning him at all in my original post). I provided several links, even taking the time to deliberately choose the pages that best explained the issue in the most straightforward way possible.

In which I am vaguely threatened with a bogus copyright claim

Davy Vara [source]

I’m a nobody. I’m talking in the grand scheme of things – or even as specifically as in the Canadian atheistic blogosphere. There’s no shame to it; it just is. This here blog gets just over a hundred individual visitors (or 200 pageviews) per day on average, which may sound minimally impressive until one realizes that even moderately popular bloggers like Hemant Mehta or Ed Brayton rack up as much traffic in less than an hour (and let’s not even mention the juggernaut that is PZ Myers). Frankly, I consider myself fortuitous that enough people even notice this place to validate its inclusion in Google’s database.

So, all things considered, you can imagine my surprise when I received this email earlier today:

Personally identifying information uncensored because he doesn’t deserve the courtesy or effort.

In which I poke the beast of far-Right ad-hominem!

(NOTE: This post is quite long and JavaScript-heavy, so it may take a few moments to load.)

Well, well. It appears I’ve finally realized my sorta-dream of becoming a brief pseudo-celebrity on Twitter, at least in the sights of the far-Right wingnuttia. I don’t get why people complain about how difficult and painful it is to suffer the onslaught of neo-conservatism’s finest – this is awesome.

(… Okay, so perhaps I’m a tad masochistic. Bear with me.)

Firstly, some obligatory background: So today is Memorial Day, and there’s apparently quite a bit of brouhaha on Twitter over comments made by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes implying that merely enlisting in the armed forces, and even dying in battle, doesn’t inherently make one a “hero”. He took a cautious and measured approach, and I completely agree. Yes, many soldiers are undeniably heroic; no reasonable individual could say otherwise. But it’s also true that many aren’t. Soldiers are human, and thus, are prone to any vice that non-combatants may exhibit (which WikiLeaks has done an exceptional, if supremely uncomfortable, job of revealing). To treat members of the military as if they were infallible and sacred by mere virtue of their employment demeans both linguistics and reason itself, in addition to stripping the humanity from the actual heroes in the military.

Naturally, never a fan of nuanced discussion or divergent opinions, the Right immediately went into all-out manufactroversy mode, with all the usual suspects unleashing all the usual barbs against Hayes for having the sheer gall to question the sanctity of their fetishized armed forces. I won’t mention it much here; simply take the typically measured words of Ann Coulter as a template for a decent idea of the substance of the response. These children really don’t play well with others.

Kurt Schlichter

Then again, perhaps calling these people “children” is just mean to actual young’uns, as I doubt even a third-grader would pen something as puerile and idiotic as this Breitbart.com column by Kurt Schlichter, which can be adequately summarized thus: “Waugh, ‘leftist twerp’ and ‘MSNBC drone’ sounds like a ‘commie grad student’ for saying that not all members of a chosen profession I really like are automatically ‘heroes’!” (You have now been spared any need to actually click that link. You’re welcome.)

And so, as is customary whenever I come across something worth mentioning, I casually scribbled a brief response for the next Daily Blend and tweeted it, along with some supplemental thoughts:

Preliator hits 100,000!

Earlier today, at around 10:20 AM, some lucky passer-by officially became the 100,000^th visitor to land on this blog. Three years in and 3,385 blog posts (and literally dozens of comments) later, Preliator is officially … moderately well-trafficked. By small blog standards. Or something.

Whelp. That one kinda died, didn’t it?

My transcript: (click the [+/-] to open/close →)

[−]

VISITS

Total: 100,026
Average Per Day: 123
Average Visit Length: 2:11
Last Hour: 7
Today: 82
This Week: 860

PAGE VIEWS

Total: 154,562
Average Per Day: 190
Average Per Visit: 1.5
Last Hour: 7
Today: 133
This Week: 1,332

It’s been a great pleasure blogging so far. Even though this blog really is just my personal outlet/journal at its core, I can’t deny being rather tickled by the idea that over 100,000 individuals have frequented my writings here, not to mention my approximately 72 RSS readers (though that number fluctuates a bit too widely from day to day to be entirely reliable) and (somewhat less relatedly) the 302 bored saps stalking me on Twitter. I know these stats pale in comparison to even other relatively low-traffic blogs, but frankly, it’s more than I ever expected. And I have no plans to stop any of this for the foreseeable future (or at least for however long it takes for conservatives and religionists to stop saying and doing stupid things).

Anyway, I suck at this self-congratulatory crap, so I’ll make it short: Thanks to everyone who, for some reason or other, has chosen to stick around. Your comments, relatively few as they may be, never fail to make getting up in the morning a little more worth it.

Merci, and peace, y’all.

(100,000!!!11!)

Tags: Preliator

Exactly 20 years ago today …

On this day, back in the snow-sodden, technologically repressed ages of 1991, the dreary clouds parted, a rainbow shone through, and all the birds and launched into song as the angels heralded the advent of a glorious new being into the world.

Oh, and meanwhile, I was born, too.

Odd, I feel like I’m 19 again.