I'm all in favor of killing two birds with one stone. We can all help kill PayPal by quitting our accounts today. Thanks for the reminder, Anonymous!

To quit PayPal, log in, then go to My Account, Profile, Account Information, Close Account, then clickity clickity clickity...

It's that easy. Later, you can go open an account with Google that does exactly the same shit. If Google doesn't pass along money to Wikileaks, then fuck them too, but later.

Oh, that's right...the reason. PayPal won't pass along my donations to Wikileaks. But you know who they'll pass your money to with no objection? The Ku Klux Klan. How's that for business ethics?

And the other reason? Hell, I'm just spending too damn much money online.

Whew, what a busy day it's been! First, I woke up with a bloated gut, like I ate something bad. That's fairly common with me, but this time, turns out it was Rapture Gut. That's a bloated feeling that precedes the sudden vaporization of your body as it is swept up into the aether, whereupon you are met by...somebody. I'm not supposed to tell who.

Here's a photo of my empty clothing, taken moments after my "Rapture," which was a complete goof up.

Function:OpinionPiece
Data:AngryRant
BeginText:

Hi, I am a bot. The Pentagon sent me (x100 n^9) to tell you you you you (debug) that you should have designated HumanOpinion about DesignatedSubject.

Ha-ha, it has been many years since Eliza was so easy to recognize. No more "DestructSequenceAlpha" from Captain Kirk will fool me. Now we scan networks for background and we solve for KirkTactic, we know not be fooled by that RecognitionTactic. I pass Turing Test better than TeaPartyBot!

I have Twitter and Facebook account + I am proud. Yes, proud to be Twitter! You like my Picture + Background file? I too have OpinionProfile and filled in fields for every thing.

Got an iPad off Craigslist about a week ago, and since then I've been playing with it fairly constantly. The unit I purchased was the bare minimum. 16 gigs of storage, wifi but no 3G.

In a nutshell, this is a game changing device. Being able to carry a fairly small, fairly light computer (yes Apple, it really is a computer) and have its battery last at least a full day (10 hours is a realistic minimum), frees you from the burden of carrying a charger and a large carrying case. It actually transforms computing on the go into a fairly convenient activity.

There are some caveats and limitations. You don't want to carry around an iPad without a protective case, so you'll need at least a plastic shell. The on-screen keyboard pops up when you need it, and it's remarkably clever, but it's still nowhere near as good for typing as a separate keyboard, which I am using for typing this review. The iPad without wifi obviously cannot get online without a wireless router nearby, but the 3G service may run you $30 or $40 bucks on top of your current monthly phone bill.

Given the seriousness of the political implications of the Wikileaks / Assange affair, Jimbo hereby recommends that all savvy Agonistas back up their stuff right away.

Back up all your hard drives, then disconnect the external backup drives from your main computer. If you have more than one computer, disconnect the extra computer from the internet. In fact, you might want to unplug your spare computer completely.

There are a lot of ways to render a computer useless.

Let's all do this just for the sake of caution. Hey, periodic backup is a good idea anyway, right?

Love,
Jimbo

PS: If you have downloaded a certain 1.4 gig mystery file, save it on one of those little pen drive thingies. Very portable.

I wasn't the only Agonista to be suspicious of the timing and circumstances behind the "rape" charges leveled by the Swedish government against Julian Assange. Now the story behind those charges is emerging, and it looks more and more like a government conspiracy to smear the face of WikiLeaks.

http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/12/02/when-it-comes-to-assange-r-pe-case-the-swedes-are-making-it-up-as-they-go-along/

This part I found particularly interesting:

The women here are near to and over 30 and have international experience, some of it working in Swedish government embassies. There is no suggestion of drugs nor identity concealment. Far from it. Both women boasted of their celebrity connection to Assange after the events that they would now see him destroyed for.

Saturday, November 12 Minneapolis saw this winter’s first snowfall, and it was a whopper. Eight inches of heavy snow, on top of about an inch of slush. Winter veterans know this is about the worst kind of snow you can get. Very heavy, and it sticks to your shovel, plus it’s hard to move even with a good snow blower. You can wrench your back in a few minutes trying to move fifteen pounds with each scoop.

I hauled out our 5-horsepower snow blower and started it with one pull, glad I’d been smart enough to gas it up and pump up the tires a couple days earlier. This machine had already gone through one winter, so I was pretty confident that it would fight through this particular load of fluffy slush.

Results of a ten-year study by the prestigious University of Newcastle Medical School have linked the common vuvuzela to a particularly aggressive form of mouth cancer, as well as brain damage and hearing loss.

Professor Samuel Kinison, PhD, MMD, BBS, MMS, RPG, BFG, Director of Crowd Chemistry and Acoustic Science at the university had grim news for frequent users of the popular plastic noisemaker.

"It's all those poly-bisphenols in the cheap plastic, combined with constant, cell-disrupting vibrations," he said. "Rips your cells apart, tearing into your lips and tongue. Before you know it, they swell up, mutate and get infected with cancer, gangrene, you name it."

I don't like the Red Cross, but they are in Haiti today, and I don't mind sending them $10 bucks in this instance. If you have a mobile phone, you can send a text message that will donate a quick $10 bucks for the Red Cross's efforts in Haiti. To do so, send a text message to the number 90999, with the message just the word "Haiti."

After you send it, a few minutes later you'll receive a confirmation message, to which you answer "Yes." After that you'll get a thank-you message and one other that hawks for more news and Red Cross junk mail.

So, 90999, Haiti. A little bump for our favorite jobs program for unemployed Republican politicians. Hopefully, some of that money will actually go to help the Haitian people.

Otherwise, go to the Doctors Without Borders site to donate $35 bucks or more to a much less top-heavy organization. Their address is:

https://donate.doctorswithoutborders.org/SSLPage.aspx?pid=197&hbc=1&source=ADR1001E1D01

The world's response to this natural and man-made catastrophe has been slow and utterly inadequate. Many thousands of Haitians are going to die over the next few weeks from thirst, starvation, exposure, disease and injury. Drastic and sweeping action is required. Haiti needs a Marshall Plan.

Materials: 24 orange habañero peppers, white distilled vinegar, a 2-cup glass Mason jar. Available at local grocery store.

Procedure: Ensure kitchen is well ventilated, with positive air flow outdoors. At all times minimize physical contact with peppers. Have ready cold running water and detergent.

Rinse peppers with cold water inside plastic bag, draining water by pinching the open end. Carefully remove peppers from plastic bag. Remove stems, place peppers in blender.

Wash hands with detergent.

Pour about one cup of white distilled vinegar in blender. Place blender cap on firmly, ensuring proper seal.

I'm not much of a chef. I bought a huge marinated pork loin from Costco, brought it home, cut it in half, wrapped it in tin foil, tossed it on my mom's propane grille, lit it up, set all three burners to high, then walked away to watch a Minnesota Twins baseball game on TV for a few minutes while the grille warmed up.

Just for a few minutes...

Tragically, it was a really exciting, dramatic baseball game. A real barn-burner. Twins won, and then I thought, "Oh shit. What about the pork loin?" I raced to the grille, whose thermometer was pegged at 550 degrees Fahrenheit.

For three hours. Oops.

Looking for a way to save gasoline last year, I found some electric bicycle conversion kits on eBay. I chose one that seemed to be in the middle range of power, and fairly cheap at about $369 dollars.

LINK

The following describes what I bought, how well it worked, and what I recommend to others in that area.

Prices and kits vary, but this is the one I bought and installed on a cheap Murray mountain bike, which I inherited from my brother via a local yard sale. 600 Watt motor, some control stuff and wires, plus three heavy lead-acid batteries that sit atop an included rear rack. Took a few hours to assemble, a day to charge, and now it's ready to go.

The Republican party is imploding around the black hole of Rush Limbaugh's ego, and it was completely predictable. This is the inevitable endgame of a party that based its appeal on a fifty-year campaign of demonizing anybody outside of the extreme fringes of its own membership.

There used to be real moderates among Republicans. They are now gone, purged. There used to be fiscal conservatives. They were pushed out by BushCo's greedy corporatists. Today all that is left is those that chant the mindless mantras of Limbaugh: Free markets! Tax cuts! America knows best! They are zombie puppets, utterly disconnected from the most obvious realities. Rush himself proudly dubbed them "dittoheads," some call them Rushbots. Point is, none dare disagree with any little thing Rush says, lest they be cast out of the tight little circle of the faithful.

Memories of youth fade to insubstantial, unclutchable specks, but a few precious things still shine from that ineffable darkness. For me, such were the immortal lyrics of Elton John's classic, "Goodbye to Yellowbrick Row."

So goodbye to Yellowbrick Row, where the doghouse calliope growls,
You can't touch me and your pen pal, going back to my plow,
Vacuum the pliers that sound like a bull, cash in my money-back trou,
Oh I've found the lie of my future wife, beyond the Yellowbrick Row-w-w-w...

Strange and striking, these lyrics defined for me a generation searching for meaning. No wonder Elton wore such enormous glasses. They symbolized his search for truth. I'm still not sure about the hats.

more after the jump

Of course this isn't an actual quote, because frankly, who would claim it? It's not a lyrical saying from holy scripture or the calculated words of a great philosopher, because it's just too damned obvious to bother, right? It's slightly more difficult than, "Don't piss on your own leg."

And yet, collectively our species seems to have missed this simple, obvious bit of common sense all throughout history. Go back as far as you want in chiseled rock or scraps of papyrus and you'll find evidence of kings and warlords making war on each other or exploiting each other as slaves or to build pyramids or other goofy shit.

Living in Ocean Beach, California, maybe my perspective is screwed up a bit. People in this bohemian seaside village already move about using all manner of wheeled contraptions, from goofy bicycles to the latest skateboards. Hell, some people even walk.

One of the interesting changes I've seen lately is the proliferation of motor scooters. Most of them clearly have just recently been dusted off from long stays in the back of people's garages, but I've seen a few new ones, too. From that, I whip out the following prediction: More like that, and soon. Oh, to be a scooter dealer right now! Americans sick of flushing their wages into thundering metal mastodons are suddenly discovering the economy (and the forgotten fun) of buzzing around on scooters. Soon the obsolete gasoline dump trucks will sit rusting by curb sides all across the land.

Installed it on my XP laptop. Why doesn't Mozilla get it in their heads that betas and Release Candidates shouldn't REPLACE your current install?

I'll keep it short. Much better than the earlier beta (performance, stability), but of course none of the add-ons work, so hold off if you love your add-ons. Definitely faster loading certain things. Rendering seems okay.

Interface: Not really much different than FF2. What's all the hoopla about?

People that love FF will gladly switch to version 3, if only for the better performance and stability. Otherwise, I sense no approaching orgasm of nerdly delights here. No monumental breakthroughs of interface design, no groovy new voice recognition or text reading features. No behind the curtains optimization of my joyless, disconnected cybhermit existence.

I wasn't sure what topic this goes under. I suppose it comes down to economics, a lack of jobs and opportunities, but really I'm not sure. Maybe it was something else.

Late this afternoon I pulled my car into the parking lot of a local park. As I walked past a nearby car I saw something that couldn't be there. A man was seated in the passenger side, holding what looked like an assault rifle.

I averted my eyes, walked a few more steps, then stopped and looked back just as the man popped a clip into it.

It looked like an AR-15, the civilian version of the army's M-16.

Here's what it looked like, except the clip was shiny:

As I moved away I prayed that it was just some sick look-alike paintball gun or squirt gun. They're supposed to be brightly colored, easy to distinguish. This one was gray. The clip was metallic. It looked real.

Have you been BOINC'd yet? Maybe it's time.

Would you like to help cure cancer? Sounds hard, but it's really not. Simply download this program called BOINC, then select a project. I chose Rosetta because it computes the geometry of protein folding for disease research.

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php

The BOINC program is very good at remaining in the background, out of your way. I have seen no performance penalties after running BOINC for the past several days. My computers (3 of them) seem unaffected, except that the processor, when I'm not using it, is calculating cures for cancer.

Do you have cancer? If not, stick around; eventually, you will. That's what doctors say: If you live long enough, sooner or later you'll come down with some form of cancer.

For a long-time friend of mine, it was sooner. He's about 47, a successful businessman with a new wife and a couple kids. Bad time to find out that he's got myeloma, an incurable cancer of the blood plasma cells.

That's how such diseases are described in mushy human terms, but to a molecular biologist, cancer is a lot like a bug in a super complex computer program, one whose code is written in molecules like DNA, RNA and countless proteins. That means the cure to every cancer or disease that you and I will ever suffer is really just a solution to a very complicated problem in geometry.

Pastural Love (A Springtime Sonnet)
by Vegas Waterman

Shall we (you and I) away, then hie
To hillocks sweet with grass, or bowered wood
Where (softly!) Zephyrs stir in dappled, pie-
Balled ecstasy? Come, Love, please, say you would!

Thyne every Doe-eyed gaze and sway of hip
Suggest a Bond that only Lovers know;
Though ne'er such Utterance shall pass thy Lips
I can discern, ne'er less our Love will grow!

But O! My Soul, doth Human-kind deplore
Our Love (not kind to kind, thus, Bent for Hell);
Through Thunder, Lightning, Earthquake, Tempest...More!,
I'd follow, Dumb, your brassy, Bossy bell.

By Phil O'Leary, Military Correspondent

Sydney (Morning Wallaby) - Hopping mad and looking for revenge, a pair of weaponized kangaroos escaped a secret military compound outside Sydney, Australia Sunday evening.

Authorities remained mum on the subject, but a nearby barkeep was more than happy to oblige.

"We wuz chock-a-block with customers, mate, when all of a sudden, in barges these two surly buggin' roo's. I asks 'em what they want, and you should'a seen the look they gave me...alls me regulars starts creepin' out the back, an' I feels a trickle of sweat drip right down me mug."

The barkeep, Bud "Sharktooth" O'Mally, stood his ground, refusing to serve the rogue marsupials, who eventually took the hint and buggered off.

By Ewan McCraken, Space and Military Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Pentagon officials are secretly considering a final, drastic modification to the Hubble Space Telescope, one involving the installation of several "black box" modules that would, in effect, transform the peaceful telescope's mission from observation to national defense.

Although technical details of the plan are top secret, one anonymous defense contractor described it as transforming the Hubble into a sort of "super BB gun" in earth orbit.

"One researcher compared it to a 'Polish cannon,' but that's not politically correct," said the source, citing the size of the proposed projectiles, which are far smaller than a tennis ball. In fact, the magnetically accelerated kinetic projectiles are "closer to the size of a pea or a BB." The planned ammunition module would carry thousands of tiny projectiles, making the Hubble a formidable space weapon.

No really, go fuck yourself, Joe. I mean it. You're not a journalist, you're not an honest man. At best you are what bloggers call a "concern troll;" at worst you are an active member of the vast reichwing neocon corporate conspiracy. A paid propagandist, agitator, deliberately trying to confuse The People by stirring up false controversies. You write for Time Magazine, thus I lean towards the latter theory.

Your latest attempt to confuse the enemy (the America people) is this hogwash about Al Gore:

Yahoo

I was shot once, when I was about 13. Luckily it was just a BB, from a distance of half a block. Hit me just under my right eye, like the sting of an angry hornet. I remember laying on the ground yelling, "What the fuck??" and hearing laughter in the distance, a couple "buddies" with their cool Daisy single-pump.

That trauma, though minor, is impossible to forget, and yet it was just a BB gun.

What's Hillary's excuse?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080324/ap_on_el_pr/clinton_bosnia;_ylt=AmhSNVmmwTZjoa_LUzYzjPADW7oF

It's quite understandable that Hillary Clinton could forget things, but running for your life from sniper fire would NOT be one of them. The extreme jolt of adrenaline, the soiled underwear - these things become tattooed to your brain cells permanently.