Okay, seriously, when is Andy Dick going to stop being America's leading jackass?

Have you heard the latest? He was totally wasted at a BW3's here in the LA area last night and somehow got caught on video threatening to hit someone with a ketchup bottle after being harassed by them. At first I thought he'd been arrested for wielding a ketchup bottle which, aside from the fact that that's incredibly petty, is totally fucking hilarious. But, no, it gets better.

Apparently the cops got called when he excused himself from the restaurant and was then seen moments later urinating on the sidewalk out front. When the cops arrived they found him in a van with a bunch of witnesses standing nearby saying he'd just pulled the bra off some random 17-year-old girl exposing her breasts and humiliating her. When searched they found weed and Xanax in his pockets and discovered that he'd been mixing them heavily with alcohol. Which is, you know, a great way to start your night if you plan on ending it by going out like Jimi Hendrix drowning in your own vomit.

Finally, lets not forget that Andy Dick was the guy witnessed pressuring Chris Farley to "go smoke some crack" the night that Farley died of an overdose.

It's so weird seeing the memorial service for Tony Snow in Washington D.C. on the news tonight. I still have clear memories of him subbing for classes I had in high school back in Cincinnati. It was trippy enough when he ended up becoming one of the area's leading news anchors later in the 90s, but it was truly bizarre once he was routinely on the national news as White House Press Secretary in recent years. And now he's gone and at at a relatively young age. And, unlike a lot of people in the Bush camp -- Snow being one of a number that I've met or known in real life -- he really was a really nice guy. I feel bad for him that he spent his final years being associated with something so negative. On the other hand, he probably had the time of his life working for the President of the United States regardless of the state of the current administration.

I'm pretty sure I've posted this before and a lot of you probably also have seen it posted in blozor's LJ (which is how I got introduced to it), but today it's funny all over again and so here we go...

I just discovered this picture of Lewis Black and Gene Ween taken at last year's Bonnaroo:

Lew and Gener -- the creators of my favorite comedy and favorite music unexpectedly meeting for the first time! I wonder where Deaner was though? You put all three of those guys in one picture and you have three of the five people I idolize more than anyone (Katharine Hepburn and Hunter Thompson being the other two).

This month saw the launch of SpeedMatters.org which makes available the first ever state-by-state report on Internet connection speed in the United States [PDF].

It doesn't paint a pretty picture. The US falls behind virtually every industrialized nation on the planet when comparing broadband infrastructure and development.

Additionally, SpeedMatters.org offers visitors a tool for zooming in even further to view broadband measurements by county and even zip code.

I'm sorry about the previous post (which is gone now). I'm still maintaining my stance, but I was stupid for expecting anything but a negative response to such an unpopular opinion.

Just now I was out four-wheeling in the foothills behind our house when I suddenly noticed an enormous cloud of smoke at least a mile tall coming from the Tehachapi Mountains in the nearby distance. The thing is, the top of the cloud was snow white and the shape was roughly symmetrical. Forest fires don't look like that, explosions do. I can't find anything about anything in the Tehachapis in todays news. It's really weird, something happened up there and the world just hasn't heard yet.

Article ganked from inflorescence. Who also made a really good connection to the story and the flooding in Iowa and elsewhere which I will get to momentarily.

The following items were taken from an article in Rolling Stone called Pork's Dirty Secret which discusses America's top pork producer, Smithfield Foods, who "churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed rivers, killed millions of fish and generated one of the largest fines in EPA history..."

[*] "...Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens... There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth..."

[*] "...The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs..."

[*] "...Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs' immune systems..."

[*] "...Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides..."

[*] "...The drugs Smithfield administers to its pigs, of course, exit its hog houses in pig shit. Industrial pig waste also contains a host of other toxic substances: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorous, nitrates and heavy metals. In addition, the waste nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens that can cause illness in humans, including salmonella, cryptosporidium, streptocolli and girardia. Each gram of hog shit can contain as much as 100 million fecal coliform bacteria..."

[*] "...The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond..."

[*] "...Smithfield's holding ponds -- the company calls them lagoons -- cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep..."

[*] "...Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous..."

Okay, now consider the following:

(1) The virus behind the 1918 Flu Pandemic -- the virtually biblical plague that is estimated by some to have killed more people than WWI and WWII combined -- is widely thought to have been "bred" in the horribly filthy pig pens and slaughterhouses just behind the front line trenches of World War I.

(2) We are waaay overdue for another flu pandemic.

(3) What Smithfield Foods is doing in these pork "farms" is many times worse than the conditions back in WWI.

(4) In recent years, researchers have warned us more than once that attacking large volumes of biological contagions with anti-bacterial and anti-viral chemicals might actually *contribute* to the creation of super-bugs like the 1918 influenza strain. Specifically, bugs that survive the initial chemical assault are forced to adapt to the harsh environment by simply developing better defenses and more aggressive behavior.

(5) With the flooding in Iowa -- America's largest pork producer -- there are no doubt many, many, many "farms" of this sort that have overflowed in the manner the article described.

Conclusion? Well, best case scenario there's going to be one hell of nightmarishly disgusting mess to clean up. But worst case scenario? What may be the spawning pools of the next biblical plague just got dumped all over the middle of North America. That can't be good.

I just saw the most disturbing thing on TV. It was a story from several years back about an otherwise good mother from an middle-to-upper-class area of Florida who flipped out one day and murdered her her five-year-old twins boys by shooting them in the head. Then there was and endless series of interviews with law enforcement and prosecutors that followed in which she was painted as pure evil -- which makes sense considering what she did.

And then suddenly the show changed gears as one prosecutor off-handedly mentioned something about the murders: the mother was seriously mentally unbalanced at the time due to being improperly treated with anti-depressants.

Check this out. The mother had recently gotten divorced and had become severely depressed. She'd never been in such a state before and didn't know what was wrong with her and so she went and saw her family doctor. He prescribed Zoloft and sent her on her way. However, very quickly she realized her symptoms were not only getting worse, but she had developed an uncontrollable urge to drink alcohol despite no history of alcoholism whatsoever. The last straw was when she found herself standing in the closet where her father kept his revolver, holding the revolver and loading it in preparation to kill herself. She suddenly realized what she was doing and called her doctor's office and told them what was going on. They said the doctor was booked for the next three weeks but she could come in and talk to one of his nurse practitioners. Not knowing what else to do, she saw the nurse and described her inexplicable drinking and suicidal behavior after starting Zoloft. The nurses solution was to simply change her prescription from Zoloft to Paxil. She asked the nurse if she should taper off Zoloft and then taper onto Paxil, but the nurse said no, just stop the Zoloft today and start the Paxil tomorrow.

With reservations, she did what the medical professionals told her to do. And later that week she killed her sons for no reason and without any history of violence. At her trial all this info about her medication was virtually thrown out for being irrelevant. She was eventually convicted on two counts of first degree murder and is currently serving back-to-back life sentences.

Well, allow me to retort...

#1 - Family doctors: You are not fucking psychiatrists. STOP prescribing anti-depressants. #2 - Nurse practitioners: You are not psychiatrists nor any other form of doctor. You do NOT write prescriptions -- that shit is FUCKING IMMORAL AND ILLEGAL. #3 - WHEN SOMEONE TELLS YOU THEY ATTEMPTED SUICIDE YESTERDAY, FUCKING INTERVENE AND HELP THEM. #4 - Anti-depressants are dangerous drugs that not even their creators fully understand. If they are improperly administered, the side-effects can be incredibly severe up to and including PSYCHOTIC BEHAVIOR. So... YES, THE GODDAMN FUCKING ANTI-DEPRESSANTS ARE RELEVANT TO THE CASE YOU IGNORANT MOTHERFUCKERS. #5 - Western Medicine: ENOUGH WITH ALL THE "HAPPY" PILLS ALREADY! You clearly don't know how to responsibly use half of this shit, so practice a little restraint and at least stop feeding them to us like they're candy.

To be fair, a lot of relatively safe and worthwhile medicinal treatments come in the form of a pill -- and that includes quite a few psychiatric meds as well. But when doctors and patients alike don't fully understand the effects and dangers of these meds, we're just asking for tragedy to occur. And it just disturbs the fuck out of me that even our society's brightest minds -- i.e. doctors -- fail to understand the shit that they're putting into our brains. I don't know if this is happening because the pharmaceutical companies are allowed to pay off doctors to prescribe their products as much as possible or if the doctors' egos have simply grown to the point that their overconfidence in their abilities has reached new highs, but this fucking shit has got to stop.

And it has to stop because not only do we have health professionals out there fucking up people's lives, but these doctors are also not properly educating us about these dangerous medicines. Which in turn allows for idiots in our justice system to toss victims in jail. Because, after all, how could happy pills make someone sad?

Get a fucking clue, America.

Welcome to another episode of Christian Homophobia. This week the Mormons decide to jump into the hate pool hip deep...

Mormons enter Calif. marriage fight Jennifer Dobner, Associated Press The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is asking California members to join the effort to amend that state's constitution to define marriage as being between a man and a woman. A letter sent to Mormon bishops and signed by church president Thomas S. Monson and his two top counselors calls on Mormons to donate "means and time" to the ballot measure. A note on the letter dated June 20 says it should be read during church services June 29, but the letter was published Saturday on several Web sites. Church spokesman Scott Trotter said Monday that the letter was authentic. He declined further comment, saying the letter explains the church's reasons for getting involved. The LDS church will work with a coalition of churches and other conservative groups that put the California Marriage Protection Act on the Nov. 4 ballot to assure its passage, the letter states. In May, California's Supreme Court overturned a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage, saying gays could not be denied marriage licenses. "The church's teachings and position on this moral issue are unequivocal. Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and the formation of families is central to the Creator's plan for His children," the four-paragraph letter states. "We ask that you do all you can to support the proposed constitutional amendment by donating of your means and time to ensure that marriage in California is legally defined as being between a man and a woman," church leaders say in the letter. "Our best efforts are required to preserve the sacred institution of marriage." ( California Mormons -- there are more than 750,000, according to a church almanac -- have heard and heeded similar calls from their leaders before... )

Oooh, all 750,000 of you. I think there's 750,000 gay people in West Hollywood alone. Get ready for a massive dose of fail.

Seriously, why do so many people think that Christianity somehow "invented" marriage and, that by being Christian, they somehow have exclusive rights to it? People have been saying vows and making commitments to each other since thousands of years before Christ was even born. Marriage isn't about Jesus, it's about two human beings settling down and dedicating themselves to each other as a means of not only maintaining a strong society, but hopefully finding some true happiness during the short time that we all have in this world.

Recent arrivals in my email inbox:

After basking in the sublime nonsensicality of what appears to be snippets of old novels masquerading as interpersonal communication, also note that the addresses in the "To:" fields are different and that neither of them are mine. Weird.

On a semi-related note, I'm changing my surname to DeJesus.

Yeah, so I couldn't stay away from LJ.

Though I'm not exactly back either. At first I had to get away, but then I decided I wanted to stay away as part of my greater plan to spend less time on the computer. But I keep coming across things I want to share and, since I'm alone most of the day...

Anyway, check out this picture of the Mojave Desert as it appears here in Rosamond. This is actually a few blocks to the west, but it might as well be my backyard for all the similarities.

Notice the strange, tan stuff in the center of the picture? They're not rocks.

( They're... )

This is utterly random (potentially to a fault), but what else is my LJ about anymore?

I'll post naked baby photos of myself if someone can identify where this came from and what its significance is without searching (though I doubt it would help much)...

"Today’s big story centers around the killing of District Attorney MacGraw whose body was found in his garage murdered Doctors are under the impression that these crimes are being perpetrated by dead men charged with atom rays giving them super-human strength and making them impervious to bullets." Well, if you want to believe that story, you can.

Here's some clarification -- and a hint of sorts as well: Not the movie, but the song and the man behind it.

Top 20 Nations Ranked by Availability of Broadband Service
1) Denmark
2) Netherlands
3) Switzerland
4) Korea
5) Norway
6) Iceland
7) Finland
8) Sweden
9) Canada
10) Belgium
11) United Kingdom
12) Australia
13) France
14) Luxembourg
15) United States
16) Japan
17) Germany
18) Austria
19) Spain
20) New Zealand

(source: OECD Broadband Statistics, June 2007)

Dude! We got beat by Luxembourg! We're so fucking rad.

Seriously, wtf? Maybe it's lack of connections that explains why our Internet service sucks even though we have the top tier package. That or it's because we have DSL. Or because our roommate is jacked into World of Warcraft like it was the freakin' Matrix. (woah.. WoW = The Matrix; I can't be the first person to make that analogy, can I?)

( On a semi-related note -- and this is directed at the tech world though lj-friends are encouraged to chime in -- what's with the recent heavy usage of the term  )

Not more than thirty minutes after I made the last post (including some snarky comments about YouTube, media piracy and greedy nit picking) I received this in my inbox:

(Sorry, Jessica, that vid for your upcoming post is already dead thanks to those friggin' sheep over at EweTube.)

...though I already uploaded it again and the link is forthcoming. SUCKAS!

I stumbled across this article in Broadcasting & Cable magazine and was not only surprised by the message, but also who was delivering it:

Internet Is the New TV, Says Hannah Head Peterman Says Internet Is The New Home For Creative Television Writers. By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 5/6/2008 9:10:00 AM Steve Peterman, executive producer of Hannah Montana and a member of the Writers Guild, told a Capitol Hill audience Tuesday that the Internet is unquestionably the new TV, and that Congress needs to make sure that the major media companies don't control access to that new medium as they do to their old one. At a hearing on an "Internet Freedom" bill the Writers Guild strongly supports, Peterman told a House Telecommunications & Internet Subcommittee panel Tuesday that when he began 20 years ago, he could watch "smart, funny, though-provoking" shows like Cosby, Cheers, Roseanne and Murphy Brown. Now, he said the independent companies that produced them have disappeared. He blamed the "unraveling" of the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules. Those were the FCC rules that prevented networks from having a financial interest in the domestic syndication of programming on their prime time airwaves...

Normally you hear the words "Hannah Montana" and it's just part of that pop culture white noise that surrounds us. You don't expect anything particularly useful or intellectual to follow them, but not so in this case -- this guy is actually really intelligent.

When I was studying communications in college it was the late 1990s our department head taught much of the comm law classes and he warned us that programming was going to take a nose dive in the 2000s due to the "fin-syn" rules (aka the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules) being recently abolished. What that meant is that networks could now produce and own the programming they aired in prime time. As a result we don't have nearly as many independent companies selling to the networks -- companies that had few creative restrictions which allowed for the creation of programs like Cosby and Roseanne that were smart and clever as well as socially conscious and even challenging. Instead we typically see the networks producing the cheapest, simplest and some would argue "dumbest" programming that will still get enough viewers in front of the TV set to make the advertisers, sponsors and eventually the network itself even more wealthy than they already are. Case and point: reality television.

Sure there's a lot of quality programming out there still, but Peterman is absolutely right, it's far from the norm like it used to be. And that's a horrible shame. Art and money are both fine things when considered separately, but where they intersect is almost like the intersection of science and religion. That is to say, both have an undeniable and profound presence in human civilization as a whole, but things typically get ugly when they thoroughly mix. Art and science sets us apart from the animals, whereas money and religion can make us behave like an animals if we aren't careful. Don't think it's getting to that point with television? Keep reading.

... Peterman said that seven conglomerates now control nearly all information and content, with the Internet the new place for writers to be creative and independent "without getting notes from 30 executives with no sense of humor." He said that not only did the writers strike help send some members to the Internet via content deals, some were even posting content for free for the sheer joy and freedom of it, a freedom he said Congress needs to help preserve and codify...

Only *seven* conglomerates control it all. Let's be more specific: less than a hundred probably rich, white, conservative men control all of the content on TV in America. And the result is that content has generally become so uncreative and poor that content creators are working for free on the Internet just to escape writing the crap that networks are demanding! I don't care what anybody says, that's a cultural disaster waiting to happen.

... While Peterman said Congress needed to preserve that open market, but he added that he did not mean protecting a "thieves market." He applauded efforts by networks and studios to crack down on pirated content. He pointed out that there were something like 110,000 Hannah Montana-related videos on YouTube, "most of which were stolen," and none of which puts any money in his pocket or others involved with the show.

He was doing so well, but then he had to go and end it with a bunch of whining about "piracy". A hundred thousand clips of Hannah Montana on YouTube isn't piracy, it's fan worship. The advertising and publicity that that show gets from all those clips is priceless. Also I find it more than a little hypocritical that he think the networks are greedy and yet has no problem whining not getting a paycheck for bits and pieces of his show being displayed on YouTube where *no one* is making any money off of it.

... He said the videos got there after some of the episodes he had supplied to Disney last year got into the hands of private citizens and made it to YouTube before they had even aired on the Disney Channel.

Okay, that kind of sucks. But still, it's to be expected to a certain extent because hardcore fans do crazy shit. Just ask George Lucas.

... House Telecommunications & Internet Subcommittee Chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who introduced the bill Peterman was testifying in support of, has said he is not interested in protecting pirates, and said Tuesday he wished his opponents would stop suggesting he was. His bill would protect only legal content, he said.

Back on topic, I totally feel for Rep. Markey in this case. It's extremely frustrating to hear wealthy America accusing the supporters of Internet Freedom and Net Neutrality -- the legislative movements that aim keep the Internet from turning into a commercial mess like network television -- of merely trying to protect pirates.

Ganked from lagizma.

Here's a little something from NPR discussing how the global cocaine trade has shifted from focusing on America to focusing on Europe due to the strength of the Euro over the weakened US Dollar.

Now the following deviates from the above story, but the last few words of the story reveal something very interesting -- during a recent visit to Europe, US Drug Czar John Walters admitted that the claim that America intercepts roughly 10% of the drugs that cross our borders is....

...that's right, completely made up.

( Do you have any idea how many DEA success stories over the decades have revolved around that 10% 'theory'? )

Have you guys heard about the "Pentagon Pundits" scandal? It's about to break wide open any day now. And there's really no other way to describe it than this:

The United States government has been seeding the American press with individuals posing as unbiased experts on the military and the Middle East when, in fact, these individuals are actually pro-war pundits who work for a secret PSYOPS program being run out of the Pentagon that aims to psychologically manipulate the American public into supporting the occupation of Iraq and possibly an upcoming invasion and occupation of Iran.

...and what's more, media outlets like Fox News are still airing these assholes as if they were completely credible experts even though they've already basically been caught red handed engaging in a propaganda campaign of the worst kind.

I know this sounds a bit like conspiracy theorist material, but this is the real deal. The people exposing this are groups like the Center for Media and Democracy and the Free Press Action Fund which are organizations too large to be messing around with hearsay and potentially libelous speech. In fact, here's a Free Press vid that's been circulating on YouTube the demonstrates what's going on:

If you want to make a difference and put a stop to this bullshit there are three things you can do:

1)  Write Senator Barbara Boxer who, as Chair of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, is in a key position to investigate and hold hearings on this matter...
2)  Write your representatives in Congress...
3)  Spread the above video around as much as possible (post in your LJ, etc.).

The long awaited and highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto IV comes out tomorrow. My pre-ordered copy left warehouses in Phoenix today. Yes, I'm a sixteen-year-old boy... or at least I will be for the next month or two.