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sick and wrong
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2005-01-09
I knew it! Yes, modern art is complete crap, and a hoax. Just as I had suspected. To me, the "art" is in convincing someone that it *is* art, and getting them to pay money for it / place it in high regard.
Do you find modern art baffling and depressing? Have you ever wondered if it's all a ridiculous hoax? Don't worry. It's meant to be baffling and depressing, and it is a ridiculous hoax.
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my site
sick and wrong
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2005-01-09
Doh! Lost my slug settings: Weeeelllll, I used slug and wrote a super-long introspective entry and then managed to lose it because my slug settings were for some reason hosed. Now I can't remember some of the values for some of the fields, and I've emailed Daniel to tell me the magic values to fix it all up right. I'm tapping my foot, impatiently waiting...
UPDATE: W00t, Daniel came through in a jiffy, and everything is spiffy now. Yea!
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sick and wrong
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2005-01-09
Why I hate my country, part N: This poor guy was kidnapped, interrogated, and abused, all because his name was close to that of a guy suspected in connection with 9/11 stuff. Way to go, America. God, this stuff just makes me sick. :(
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sick and wrong
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2004-12-25
Death penalty for torture: I wanted to look this up, and lo and behold I have found it here. These people who tortured prisoners to death? They can face the death penalty.
(a) Offense. - Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.
(b) Jurisdiction. - There is jurisdiction over the activity prohibited in subsection (a) if -
(1) the alleged offender is a national of the United States; or
(2) the alleged offender is present in the United States,
irrespective of the nationality of the victim or alleged
offender.
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sick and wrong
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2004-12-13
I feel sick: This blog post about how the Bush administration has completely dropped the ball on torture policies just makes me sick to my stomach. I mean, when the torture memos broke, at least people said "hmm, maybe that's not a great policy", but since then, they've come out with *nothing*. Great.
I am so ashamed of my country over this torture stuff. Words can't begin to describe it...
It's people like Alberto Gonzales who make me hate my country. If we let somebody like that win, geez... I don't know what to say. Maybe we deserve to lose.
I'm sorry. I mean, lurking inside me is a huge Abu Ghraib rant, but it's not coming out tonight. It's been roiling in my head for months.
I wish we could kick torturers out of our species for conduct unbecoming of a human being.
And to sit there, and calmly draft a memo authorizing such things. That, my friends, is the face of pure evil.
I mean, I can halfway understand evil committed in a moment of unthinking passion or something. But no, they sat down, and very carefully constructed a worldview that let them treat other human beings as objects to make suffer as much as possible.
Maybe I'm so sickened by all of this because I have some horrible feeling that someday *I* will be tortured. Damn imagination, I try to keep it on a leash, but it just doesn't work the way it used to.
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sick and wrong
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2004-08-03
Inspections? No way: I am intrigued to hear that the US now opposes inspections and verification in a treaty that is designed to ban production of highly enriched uranium and plutonium for nuclear weapons.
I mean, how boneheaded can you get? What can I really say about this, except blah blah double standard blah blah idiotic etc etc.
Administration officials declined to explain in detail how they believed U.S. security would be harmed by creating a plan to monitor the treaty.
Arms-control specialists reacted negatively, saying the change in U.S. position will dramatically weaken any treaty and make it harder to prevent nuclear materials from falling into the hands of terrorists.
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sick and wrong
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2004-08-03
Spyware vexes me: I downloaded something from suprnova.org and got hellacious bunches of spyware and adware. Ugh! So I ran ad-aware a few times (one time there were 300 items, and I had to click the little checkbox for each one individually - those buggers make it annoying like that to try to get you to pay for the full version, heh), and finally got rid of it. Well, most of it. I still get pop-ups but not very frequently, so for now I am just dealing.
I guess I'm experiencing outrage fatigue because I just don't have the energy to get as pissed off as I should be. My outrage gland has run out of juice.
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sick and wrong
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2004-08-01
Another one lost: So I read in the NYTimes about this Chinese fellow named Qingming, who couldn't afford the school fees required to be paid before he could take the college entrance exam. He was a top student, but in rural China his family was just barely scraping by.
So he stepped in front of a train.
I mean, I can see why. It's horribly tragic, but I can't help but in a small way applaud him for sending his big "Fuck You" to the world. (Okay, people will definitely think I'm nuts for saying that.)
The world needs more people like him, but instead they are ground down until they just can't take it anymore. As a species, we are so far from what we could be that it just makes me heartsick every damned day. Everywhere I turn there is another reason to be sickened and dismayed.
I am tired of feeling this way.
Anyway, here are some quotes from Qingming that I will hold dear. The kid sure had a good head on his shoulders. He is sorely missed.
Do not toady to those above.
Do not flatter the rich.
Do not cheat the poor.
Make way for a new generation.
We must extend our helping hand to any innocent underdog. Only by so doing can that person find a footing in society.
Peace be to you, Qingming.
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sick and wrong
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2002-08-22
A study on internet-savvy students: This is rather interesting... they examined the effects of kids' use of and familiarity with the internet in schools.
I haven't read the whole thing yet, but this bit particularly stood out:
In fact, if you ask these students, as we did, what would happen to them if someone waved a magic wand and took their Internet access away, many would tell you--in all seriousness--that they would just die.
Good lord. This part is followed by a quote from a high school boy who proclaims that he doesn't even read books anymore.
We're getting into some scary territory, folks...
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sick and wrong
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2002-08-20
IBM cuts bunches o jobs: Over 15,000 of them - it looks ugly. I hope that Spencer doesn't get axed. It's going to be even harder for tech people to find jobs around here than it already is - and it's pretty darn bad already.
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sick and wrong
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2002-07-29
They can have my glowsticks and my bottled water: ...when they pry them from my cold, dead hands!
In the latest ludicrosity from the War on Some Drugs, they're trying to make the anti-crackhouse laws apply to raves as well, and call bottled water and glowsticks drug paraphernalia. Lovely. Freegin idiots, I say.
The drug war has been a massive failure: a waste of money, of lives and of time. It's also been accompanied by extensive inroads on traditional American freedoms: property forfeitures, "no-knock" searches, expanded wiretap authority, and the destruction of financial privacy, to name just a few.
These are inroads that have served the agendas of bureaucrats but that haven't done anything to solve the problem that was claimed as their justification. And the drug war's combination of intrusiveness, corruption and ineptitude calls into question the government's ability to carry out the war on terrorism.
...
Not being a bureaucrat, I think the drug war is a terrible model. In fact, I think it's an argument against creating a Homeland Security bureaucracy at all. If we can't trust the government to tell a glow stick from a hypodermic needle, then I don't think we can trust it to tell the difference between an American and a terrorist.
Exactly. I'm starting to get... real, *real* creeped out by some of the latest government tricks.
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sick and wrong
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2002-07-29
The truth about corporate "solutions": I like this biting piece in Salon about how tech companies have been selling broken products for awhile. While CEOs pat themselves on the back about how well they're drumming up sales, they're oblivious to the fact that their products just plain don't work.
McNealy's attitude is the culmination of the last decade's ascendant ethos for U.S. business: near worship and lavish compensation for people who "make things happen" coupled with near contempt and minimal rewards for people who "make things work."
...
Many a CEO, or even a CIO, would be shocked to discover, were they to inquire (or encourage their subordinates to discover), that some of their employees are manually entering data (from two quarters back) into one system from printouts produced by another. Or that some 20 people buried in the customer service department do nothing, all day, but correct errors created when salespeople (after a half day's training) enter orders into a system so complicated and cumbersome that it takes weeks to train the people in customer service and accounts receivable delegated to picking up the pieces to use it properly. Or that out in the warehouse the complicated wireless system (which took years, not months, to really get working and cost four times what was budgeted) is randomly on the fritz, and stock must be picked manually several hours a day.
Yow. The truth hurts.
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animals
sick and wrong
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2002-07-10
Killer bees: A woman in Texas died recently from the stings of Africanized honey bees. Yikes. They say she was stung more than 250 times.
One hive could not be measured because it extended well into the walls of the home, he said, but the other measured about 18 inches by 10 feet.
Holy cow.
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sick and wrong
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2002-07-08
As if. Daniel showed me this site devoted to notepad.
Yes, I created the "sick and wrong" category just so I could put this item in it. (And hey, it'll come in handy later, I'm sure.)
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