Our regular featured content-

• On This Day In History December 5 by TheMomCat
• Punting the Pundits by TheMomCat

And these featured articles-

• Gen. Petraeus, Gen. Petraeus by: ek hornbeck
• No, This Fiscal Scam Won’t Be Different Than 2011. Stop Deluding Yourselves by: priceman
• Congressional Game of Chicken: Fixing Filibuster, Part III by: TheMomCat
• Hosed eh? by: ek hornbeck

Write more and often.  This is an Open Thread.

Originally posted August 31, 2011.

I think gender stereotyping is the moral equivalent of teaching children gibberish instead of a language.  It is wrong for the child and bad for society and it’s amazing to me that people defend it on the basis of biology.  Balls does not equate to brain, quite the opposite.

Easy-Bake Oven accused of sexist marketing by 13 y.o. girl (and she’s right)

by Chris in Paris, Americablog

12/4/2012 7:03pm

As someone who loves to cook, does all of the cooking at home, and who has enjoyed cooking since I was a kid, I would say most definitely, yes – the Easy-Bake Oven’s marketing is sexist (see a sampling below).

Just as it’s sexist to dissuade young girls from math, it’s completely sexist to suggest cooking is not for young boys.  And that’s what Easy-Bake Oven’s entire marketing scheme is about – girls, to the exclusion of boys.

What makes all of this a strange topic is that in the world of “top chefs” in the restaurant business, there’s also a heavy dose of sexism against women. Most of the big name chefs are men, though fortunately there are more women that are getting the respect that they deserve. Even in the context of sexism, cooking is odd since it discourages one sex or another depending on age (it’s okay for men to cook but not boys, and women’s place is in the kitchen unless it’s a really big famous kitchen).

What’s so complicated about being a boy or a girl, a man or a woman and wanting to cook without regard to your gender?

‘Worst Toy Awards’ Target Lego Friends

By KJ DELL’ANTONIA, The New York Times

November 29, 2012, 6:15 pm

The Lego Friends line may promote gender stereotyping. It may be an unnecessary segmenting off of would-be girl Lego builders into “girly” Legos and away from more basic brick sets that offer the complex challenges of creating your own models and worlds (although no more so than any branded Lego kit, all of which are too limiting in the eyes of many Lego fans). It might have provoked all sorts of debate, here and elsewhere when it was introduced, over whether the sets (designed for more role play and storytelling) exploit girls’ natural play patterns or embrace them.

…

There’s much to consider in the realm of gender-targeted marketing and products, and as I wrote earlier today, it’s all too easy to find yourself grabbing the pink Lego set for a girl without thinking about whether she’d rather just have the Volkswagon Camper Van. One of my girls loves the pink Legos. The other prefers the classic stuff. But they’re both sitting in there on the floor building and whispering stories to themselves, and that’s scarcely destructive to their childhoods.

…

Lego may have created and marketed its Friends line in the hope of selling more girls on its product, but that’s what toy companies do – and that product, no matter what color it is or what it can build, is still one of the least commercialized options out there, still without batteries or screens, and still, at its core, a building toy.

I love Legos, it’s still just about my favorite toy.  As a point of information it’s structurally possible to build a tower 2.17 miles high out of 2 x 2 bricks, but professional Lego engineers say it’s a practical impossibility because they don’t stack straight enough.

How tall can a Lego tower get?

By Ruth Alexander, BBC News Magazine

3 December 2012

“There isn’t a chance you could do it in reality,” Johnston says. “Long before the brick fails, the tower would fail as a structure itself, by buckling. The other thing you have to remember is that we were very careful to load this equally down the middle, so that all four walls were loaded.”

A 3.5km tower would have to be built so straight that it was no more than 2mm off centre at the midway point, he says.

“And I’d be delighted to meet a Lego builder who could make a 3.5km tower so accurately.”

Cue Duncan Titmarsh, the UK’s only certified Lego builder – and one of only 13 worldwide – and Ed Diment, his partner at company Bright Bricks.

They built the 12.2m (40ft) Lego Christmas tree that stood in London’s St Pancras station last Christmas, and the 5m x 3m advent calendar standing in Covent Garden.

Do they think they could take up the challenge? No.

“If you try stacking 2×2 bricks as soon as you get beyond 3 or 4m tall there’s almost no way you can take out all of the kinks,” Ed Diment says.

And their computer games are as highly structured as their bricks.

Lego The Lord of the Rings – review

Simon Parkin, The Guardian

Monday 3 December 2012

The Lego games, which seek to rebuild colossi of contemporary family cinema franchises in miniature bricks, have rather less to do with the plastic stuff from which they take their name than appearances suggest. The physical toy is a creative material that allows us to build from the imagination in near limitless ways. From a relatively small palette of interconnecting bricks – which click together with all the reassurance of a lipstick lid – one can fashion everything from a lopsided hot-rod to a lumpy dog to the Taj Mahal. Therein lies its simple wonder and universal appeal.

Traveller’s Tales’ games, by contrast, are entirely prescribed. You squeeze a button and the loose collection of bricks at your character’s feet assembles itself in a magical micro-hurricane into a bridge or a ladder or whatever object is needed to facilitate minifigure Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones’s pre-laid story. There is no capacity for personalisation; a player may only affect the rate at which they move towards the conclusion. If Minecraft is the true freeform construction game, offering players a world of blocks to heave into a world of shapes, the orthodox Lego games have us closely following an instruction manual. Piece by piece we reveal the predestined finished article, meticulously prepared for us by the game’s designers.

…

The basics of the recipe remain consistent – each cinematic plotline split into 18 sequential stages; the characters divided into “types”, each with their own set of exclusive abilities which must be called upon to overcome obstacles; the post-completion secret hunting – but the structure is ever-changing.

Lego Lord of the Rings presents the most dramatic overhaul yet, retaining the 18-stage structure, but granting players the run of Middle Earth in between these climactic chapters. It’s not quite Lego Skyrim, but these hills and valleys are filled with nooks and secrets, valuable bricks hidden behind waterfalls and deep inside yawning caves, the land seasoned with eager minifigs waiting to send you off on fetch quests. It’s this expanse of hub that gives Lego Lord of the Rings a rare sense of scale and place, one articulated by a map that, more than in Tolkien’s prose or Jackson’s film, allows one to understand exactly how Shire links to Mordor in geographical terms.

So you remember the Royal Dutch Shell Petroleum plans to drill exploratory wells in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas this summer?  Plans that were quite controversial because of the lack of any oil spill containment capability and the remoteness of even U.S. Navy and Coast Guard support (not that they’re optimized for that type of mission anyway though I suppose they could nuke the wellhead as was proposed by some during the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon disaster)?

Remember how the flagship of their high tech rapid response was a 35 year old ice breaking barge called the Arctic Challenger that was pretty much useless as an ice breaker because of design flaws even before they plated over the stern push points for the tug boats that provided the only motive power (yep, doesn’t even have its own propellers) so they could use it as a launch point for their super high tech blowout containment unit?

Remember how there were constant safety inspection failures during the refurbishing of this “loser dockside queen” culminating in the complete failure of the containment unit “Saturday, September 16th, in clear, calm, warm summer weather on Puget Sound“?

Well, thanks to KUOW Seattle National Public Radio we now know what happened blow by blow-

Day 5: The test has its worst accident. On that dead-calm Friday night, Mark Fesmire, the head of BSEE’s Alaska office, is on board the Challenger. He’s watching the underwater video feed from the remote-control submarine when, a little after midnight, the video screen suddenly fills with bubbles. The 20-foot-tall containment dome then shoots to the surface. The massive white dome “breached like a whale,” Fesmire e-mails a colleague at BSEE headquarters.

Then the dome sinks more than 120 feet. A safety buoy, basically a giant balloon, catches it before it hits bottom. About 12 hours later, the crew of the Challenger manages to get the dome back to the surface. “As bad as I thought,” Fesmire writes his BSEE colleague. “Basically the top half is crushed like a beer can.”

Like a beer can eh?  Yah don’t say.

I highly recommend clicking on the link, the picture is quite stunning.

Anyway you’ll be happy to know everything is under control.

(h/t EdwardTeller @ Firedog Lake)

Originally posted August 30, 2011.

Gen. Petraeus, Gen. Petraeus

Fox News chief’s failed attempt to enlist Petraeus as presidential candidate

By Bob Woodward, The Washington Post

December 3, 2012

So in spring 2011, Ailes asked a Fox News analyst headed to Afghanistan to pass on his thoughts to Petraeus, who was then the commander of U.S. and coalition forces there. Petraeus, Ailes advised, should turn down an expected offer from President Obama to become CIA director and accept nothing less than the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military post. If Obama did not offer the Joint Chiefs post, Petraeus should resign from the military and run for president, Ailes suggested.

…

The Washington Post has obtained a digital recording from the meeting, which took place in Petraeus’s office in Kabul.

…

McFarland mentioned her conversation with Petraeus in a FoxNews.com piece on April 27, 2011. “Our discussion was off the record, and to respect that I will not quote the general,” she wrote. By that time, it was clear that Petraeus would be nominated as CIA director. “I can’t help thinking that the Obama administration has done something a bit underhanded but politically shrewd by tapping Petraeus for the CIA,” she added, because it would remove him as a “potential rival” in the presidential contest.

On Monday, Ailes, 72, said there was “zero chance” he would leave Fox to reenter politics for Petraeus or anyone else. “The money is too good,” he said, declining to say how much he earned, although reliable reports have pegged the amount at roughly $20 million per year under a new four-year contract.

“I left politics in 1988 because I hated it,” Ailes said. “My main interest is seeing my 12-year-old’s basketball games.”

Heh.  Just another Beat Sweetener.

(I)t’s impossible to tell the difference between the tone of a reporter who we now know was literally sucking the dick of her subject and the tone of just about any other modern American reporter who is given access to a powerful person for a biography or feature-length profile.

–Matt Taibbi

At Halftime, Costas Put Spotlight on Guns. By Morning, the Spotlight Was on Him.

By BILL CARTER, The New York Times

December 3, 2012, 8:23 pm

Many of the harshest reactions to Mr. Costas’s comments charged that it was inappropriate to use the platform of an NFL telecast to make arguments concerning a hot-button issue like gun control.

Mr. Costas noted in response that N.F.L. coverage on many networks had talked about the incident all day on Sunday.

…

He said the criticisms of his commentary “hold no weight with me” because the same people saying that that was an inappropriate time and place to talk about the gun issue “would have thought it was fine if they agreed with what I was saying.”

The issue of guns has come up far too often in sports already, he said, with athletes seeming to be among the groups with the most gun owners. “Do you think the place guns have in sports is appropriate?” Mr. Costas asked. “That it’s healthy?”

He added: “I defy anyone to give me one example when an athlete having a gun averted trouble, defused a situation, protected someone from harm. But we can think of countless situations where an athlete having a gun led to tragedy.”

Compare and contrast with his colleagues whether you agree with the substance of his position or not.

I think it’s obvious why the more autocratic, authoritarian, and avaricious elements of the current criminal crony system of monarchist merchantile monopolism are constantly attempting to change the commons culture of the Internet.

They want to be able to charge you for access to the library/thesaurus/dictionary/encyclopedia/studio/printing press.

If you’re like me you’ve already switched from the sometimes evil Google to the equally corporate captured but less popular bing or Yahoo.  I personally use duckduckgo which has the benefit of not limiting the results of your searches to things you have discovered before.  If I’m searching I want to find new things, not the same old stuff I’ve already seen.

The reason I mention duckduckgo in this context is that they’ve been out in front of identifying yet another threat to our continued abusive Internet addiction, the WCIT 2/ITU treaty talks being held in Dubai, that hot bed of corporatist freedom.

Indeed the particular bone of contention in these talks is whether providers should be charged for bandwidth as well as consumers with a secondary issue of how long the United States should be allowed to continue it’s DARPANET dominance.

Now normally I’m all for socking it to the suits and chauvinists but in this case not so much.  Certainly this artistic thing I share without expectation of anything except ridicule and disagreement in return would be made even more difficult as the inputs (that’s what they call them in econospeak) became scarce and restricted and my output (such as it is) more expensive to produce and inflict upon you.

Nor am I in favor of outright government corruption and graft which appear to be the goals of the “reformers”.  Public servants should, oh I don’t know, serve the public and not their personal pocketbooks.

I realize this is radical thinking.

So with that declaration of my personal conflicts of interest and prejudice I share these stories and action items.

The not-boring guide to the United Nations’ non-takeover of the Internet

By Andrew Couts, Digital Trends

November 30, 2012

Next week, the United Nations will take over the Internet. Or, actually, it won’t take over the Internet, but it’s going to let the Russians take over the Internet. Or maybe it’s just going to poke the Internet with a stick. No, no, wait, that’s not right either… Nobody’s going to take over the Internet, but a bunch of “important people” from around the world are going to pretend like they know what’s best for the Internet, and all we can do is sit around hoping they don’t screw it up.

Yeah, that sounds more like it.

I’m talking, of course – of course – about the 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications, or WCIT, which kicks off in the fun-loving city of Dubai on Monday, December 3, and runs through December 14. During WCIT (pronounced “wicket”), member states of a UN agency called the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) will talk about a whole bunch of complicated stuff that could, somehow, affect the Internet we all love so much.

Problem is, the whole shebang is a giant mess. Worse, most of the filth is a secret – one of the many reasons people, Internet advocacy groups, governments, and companies are freaking out.

…

The whole thing is really just about money

In addition to concerns from U.S.-based Internet companies, like Google, that changes to the ITRs could result in more rules and burdensome regulation, the real worry is money. Some African and Asian nations, as well as the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO) want to impose something called “sender party pays,” which would require Web companies to pay local Internet operators around the world for the data-heavy traffic they send through their system. As former U.S. Ambassador David Gross told me earlier this year, the ETNO proposal would impose “a radical change” on “the economics of the Internet.”

According to Amb. Gross and others, the establishment of “sender party pays” could, at the very least, result in companies like Google deciding that it is not worth it financially to operate in developing nations that generate little in the way of advertising revenue. This in turn could result in these countries being kicked further behind due to a lack of access to the open Web we enjoy here in the U.S.

Columnist Michael Geist concurs that “sender party pays” would “create enormous new costs for major content providers such as Google or Netflix.”

UN internet regulation treaty talks begin in Dubai

By Leo Kelion, Technology reporter, BBC

2 December 2012

“The brutal truth is that the internet remains largely [the] rich world’s privilege, ” said Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union, ahead of the meeting.

“ITU wants to change that.”

…

The ITU says there is a need to reflect the “dramatically different” technologies that have become commonplace over the past 24 years.

But the US has said some of the proposals being put forward by other countries are “alarming”.

“There have been proposals that have suggested that the ITU should enter the internet governance business,” said Terry Kramer, the US’s ambassador to Wcit, last week.

“There have been active recommendations that there be an invasive approach of governments in managing the internet, in managing the content that goes via the internet, what people are looking at, what they’re saying.

“These fundamentally violate everything that we believe in in terms of democracy and opportunities for individuals, and we’re going to vigorously oppose any proposals of that nature.”

He added that he was specifically concerned by a proposal by Russia which said member states should have “equal rights to manage the internet” – a move he suggested would open the door to more censorship.

However – as a recent editorial in the Moscow Times pointed out – Russia has already been able to introduce a “black list” of banned sites without needing an international treaty.

…

Vint Cerf – the computer scientist who co-designed some of the internet’s core underlying protocols and who now acts as Google’s chief internet evangelist – has been even more vocal, penning a series of op-ed columns.

“A state-controlled system of regulation is not only unnecessary, it would almost invariably raise costs and prices and interfere with the rapid and organic growth of the internet we have seen since its commercial emergence in the 1990s,” he wrote for CNN.

I must admit the argument “Censorship is already possible” is not very compelling to me.

InternetCoup.org Petition

Think of all the terrible things governments do to the Internet. The US destroyed Megaupload, Russia jailed activists over a YouTube video, and China monitors Internet users’ every move– even hacking activists outside its borders.

Now imagine if a panel of governments, giant corporations, and dictatorships had absolute power over the entire Internet, deciding in secret what you can see & do online.

When the ITU meets December 3rd, they’ll decide on this. Only a global outcry can stop it.

Join us on December 3rd, and tell your leaders right now: “I don’t trust the world’s governments to run the global Internet. Don’t give the ITU any more power.”

Click through even if you don’t want to sign the petition because the page also has a lot of interesting links to futher discussions of the issues.

duckduckgo is one of the leaders in Internet privacy and they also featured this petition in a recent doodle which while not directly related speaks to some of the same concerns.

Our nation’s privacy laws are profoundly out of date. I am writing to urge you to support updating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 to protect our Fourth Amendment rights and uphold the integrity of law enforcement in the digital age.

My emails, online documents, and text messages should have the same protections from unreasonable search and seizure as my phone calls, postal mail, and paper documents. The government should have to get a warrant from a judge to obtain these documents, or to track my location using my cell phone. Prosecutors, regulatory agencies and other government officials should not be able to issue their own subpoenas to read my emails.

The last significant update to electronic communications privacy legislation was in 1986 when the Internet was in its infancy and email was a novelty. Current electronic privacy laws don’t adequately protect online communications. This legal uncertainty harms the growth of modern businesses that increasingly store documents in “the cloud.” Updating ECPA will support small businesses, create jobs, and reinforce our Constitutional rights.

I am following this issue closely and look forward to your reply.

VanishingRights.com

Our rights are in danger. The Bill of Rights was intended to grant all Americans protection from unreasonable government intrusions into our lives. Two decades ago, Congress recognized that the courts were not keeping up with the times, so it passed a law to preserve privacy rights in electronic communications. The 1986 law made some critical reforms, but came from an era with no Google, no Facebook, no World Wide Web. Now, that law needs to be updated to ensure that our rights don’t vanish as our lives move into the cloud.

Right now, the government claims that the Constitution does not protect the privacy of communications, calendars, photos and documents stored online. That 1986 federal privacy law provides some protections, but it has crazy distinctions like one rule for email more than 180 days old (no warrant required) and a different rule for email 180 days old or less (warrant required). Bottom line: the statute says the government can read a lot of your most personal stuff without a warrant. That doesn’t make any sense.

And the 1986 law didn’t even address location information, so the government claims that it can track your location using your phone without ever going to a court and getting a warrant from a judge. Congress has failed to pass common sense updates to that outdated 1986 law to ensure that privacy protections you get in your home apply equally to the Internet.

…

Congress has acknowledged in the past that legislation must be updated to keep pace with technology in order to protect the original meaning of the Constitution. In 1986 it passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). Congress thought that provisions such as the “180 day rule” made sense at the time, since most companies didn’t store your email even for six months. (In 1986, most customers downloaded their email to their personal computer, where, by the way, the government agrees it is protected by the Constitution.)

With each passing day, more and more of our personal information, business documents, and communications are stored online. Almost everyone holds years’ worth of email in webmail accounts, along with calendars, private photos, drafts and many other sensitive materials. Unless we ACT NOW to urge Congress to make common sense updates to existing privacy laws, aggressive government prosecutors will try to make the privacy promised in the Fourth Amendment obsolete.

…

The Fourth Amendment allows the government to conduct searches and seize evidence if it can convince a judge it has probable cause that a crime has been committed. These balanced protections have been the framework for legitimate law enforcement since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791. Ensuring by law that the same protections apply to the Internet doesn’t undermine law enforcement, it strengthens it by providing clarity for officers to do their jobs with integrity.

Remember, these aren’t new rights! We are simply asking for ALL of our personal information to have the SAME Constitutional protections regardless of how we choose to store it. A few courts have already recognized that the Fourth Amendment applies to the cloud, and Congress can stop the DOJ from undermining this growing body of precedent by updating ECPA.

Originally posted August 29, 2011.

The Onion Book of Known Knowledge

Starting at $15.97 (used) The Onion Book of Known Knowledge is useless even for emergency toilet paper or starting fires.

Sample entry-

Arson, term used when the purity of setting something aflame gets all tainted by meddling police and lawyers.

Do not be misled by that atypically admirable example, the bulk of the book is consumed by outrageous lies and falsehoods illustrated by this more repesentative excerpt-

Appalachian Trail, 2,180-mile-long path along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States that is the worst, least efficient way to travel from Georgia to Maine. Traversed each year by those who willingly deny the existence of America’s vast transportation system for some inexplicable reason, the Appalachian Trail takes roughly four months to hike but can be covered in two days by car, 26 hours by rail, or five hours by plane-three fully air-conditioned means of conveyance that offer zero chance of getting bitten by mosquitoes, spraining an ankle, or going weeks without bathing. If one absolutely must walk from Springer Mountain to Mount Katahdin, a far more sensible choice would be to use Interstate 95: It’s a straight shot, and there are plenty of stores and hotels along the way so that one doesn’t have to travel across 14 states while carrying 50 pounds of gear. Overall, hiking the Appalachian Trail offers nothing but the chance to grow a mangy beard and waste time. It literally defies logic.

Everyone knows that the Appalachian Trail is an entirely fictional destination used to deceive your spouse while doing the horizontal mambo with your Argentine paramour.

Product Details

• ISBN-13: 9780316133265
• Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
• Publication date: 10/23/2012
• Pages: 256
• Product dimensions: 8.74 (w) x 10.92 (h) x 0.84 (d)

(for a more extensive preview visit truthout.org)

Intertubz and Ponies, Connections #3.

Just another day at teh RenFaire.