Winnipeg is cold as fuck

What's behind the Sarah Palin announcement?

Living in America? Welcome to Iran

Imagine that 30 years ago, a coalition of the Aryan Brotherhood, the National Rife Association, the KKK, the American Independent Party, Operation Rescue, the Southern Baptist Conference and other Christian evangelical and dispensationalist groups overthrew the government of the United States to form a new Christian Republic of America.

Pat Robertson, the Supreme Leader, would be the ultimate authority in this Protestant Theocracy, with help from Jerry Falwell, Oral Roberts and that guy from the God Hates Fags church. Their theology would be based on the imminence of the End Times, Tribulation, the return of Jesus and the Rapture.

The only TV news would come from Fox, the only talk radio from Rush Limbaugh and print newspapers would have the depth of USA Today and the viewpoint of the Washington Times.

All the music would be Christian rock and/or gospel and the MTV clones would look like the 700 Club.

All newspapers, Web sites, internet service providers, cellphone companies, blogging aggregators and social media sites would be directly supervised and censored by the Ministry of Information, led by Sarah Palin, and all educational curricula would be designed by the Creation Institute peeps.

Foreign Minister Dick Cheney would blame all world's problems on the Europeans -- specifcally the French -- and look forward to the day France would be wiped off the map.

Almost all Americans of French heritage who had any money would have left the country and fled to Quebec and/or La Patrie, and French words would be banned from polite discourse. Despite the fact French people were here on the continent before the USA was founded, their history and role in the American Revolution would be obliterated from the collective consciousness.

Catholics would be tolerated, Jews allowed to stay Jewish but Muslims, Mormons, Buddhists, Bahais and Hindus would be allowed only to continue to worship in private, and denied permission to expand, refurbish or modernize any existing places of worship.

After 30 years of this, and a disputed election where the choice was between an extreme right winger and a more moderate right winger, some people would miraculously decide that enough was enough, and protest rigged elections peacefully in the street.

The FBI, bolstered by paramilitary reinforcements recruited from the Hells Angels, would be designated to crush the peaceful protests before they got out of hand. The Supreme Leader, of course, would blame it on the French.

Welcome to Iran.

goin' to the chapel of love

latimes.com still has head up butt re: the internets

The stupid Times editorial:

>>>
It's not journalism
Google's latest effort highlights the difference between what it does and what newspapers and magazines do.

August 17, 2007

Many publishers consider the Internet, and Google in particular, a greater threat to their livelihoods than Osama bin Laden.

Among those who have taken particular offense at Google are some current and aspiring newspaper publishers, including Sam Zell (who's in the process of buying Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times), who once famously asked, "If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?"

continued @

the Times


And a great point by point rebuttal of the Times' paranoid ignorance:

>>>>

The L.A. Times tells its readers: 'Shut up'

Commentary: A Times editorial attacks the concept of reader comments on news stories, declaring Google a greater threat "than Osama bin Laden."

By Robert Niles
Posted: 2007-08-17

The Los Angeles Times this morning insulted its readers in a stunning editorial that compared Google with Osama bin Laden and showed why Times editors simply do not understand the medium that is growing to dominate the news publishing industry. A point by point rebuttal follows:

Many publishers consider the Internet, and Google in particular, a greater threat to their livelihoods than Osama bin Laden.

Who are these publishers, exactly? The Times' David Hiller? Ignore the straw man here and the reader is still left with The Times' belief that a search engine company which has helped millions of people around the world more effectively find the information they need, and that has paid publishers billions of dollars to create original content (full disclosure: including OJR and me, personally) is a greater threat to journalism and Western capitalism than a murderer who killed 3,000
Americans on 9/11.

Wow.

After The Times lit its credibility on fire with that statement, one shouldn't need to dissect the rest of its ridiculous editorial.

But I will. ;-)

more @

Online Journalism Review

The email that gives Jews the 'Heebie Jeebies'

An anti-Semitic Web site is first on Google when you search for 'Jew,' and alarmist e-mail about the phenom is making the rounds again.

Two people here at JewishJournal.com got the email last week and both asked me what was up. I told them not to worry, it was old news, not to get the Heebie Jeebies.

The Heebie Jeebies -- 1932 -- the Boswell Sisters

But it was new to them, so I thought some of you guys might want to learn more as well.

Here's some background from the Anti-Defamation League and the response from Google.

The gist: We know about it, and we're working on it, please stand by.

The hate site everyone writes about is only the tip of the iceberg. The Web is filled with everything imaginable (both good and bad), and some things unimaginable. Sometimes it seems to me there are people (robots?) who do nothing but post hate and propaganda to message boards all day long, all week.

The hate on the venerable Yahoo! News message boards caused Y! (disclosure: I once worked there) to close down their message boards entirely.

The videos I see every night when I comb YouTube (search for "Jew") are a cesspool of bigotry.

What to do?

I can't speak for everyone else at JewishJournal.com, but my response is to "represent!"

That's the reason I started our JewishJournal.com YouTube Channel. Positive, fun, interesting videos. Rabbis, rockers, rebels. No hate. No anti-anything. Just the wild wonderful world of Jews, Judios, and Yahudim.

Tell your friends.

-- Dennis Wilen

The love you take, by0tch

I always want my sites to be more than ON the Web -- they need to be OF the Web as well.

This means linking out.

Linking out's rewards are manifold and glorious, a packet-protocol potlatch of publicity, and they even have their own theme song:

o/` The love you take is equal to the love you make o/`