I’m not too upset about this. I’ve not been overly impressed with the service or with the privacy issues. I’ll just stick with my Rhapsody subscription.

Unlimited listening on Spotify will vanish for U.S. early adopters next week.

Kodak declares bankruptcy: The company that captured the 20th century (Photos) – BlogPost – The Washington Post.

Inevitable but kind of sad. But hooray for evolution, competition and innovation.

This is a test post of gigantic proportions.

I drive a shit fetcher.

Every morning, I get in my shit fetcher and drive to Starbucks, where I buy coffee and something to eat. Other times I go to the mall or the grocery store in my shit fetcher and buy bags of shit and put them in my shit fetcher.

I go on a lot of shit fetching trips in my shit fetcher. Sometimes three or four in a single day.

Then I bring my bags of shit home. As the week goes on, I use shit up with a 70% efficiency rate. I put the 30% of shit I don’t use in a couple small cans.  One can is for shit that can be recycled. The other can is for shit that lasts forever.

When those cans fill up with the shit that comes from my inefficient use of the shit I bought and fetched, I put them in two larger cans of shit I keep outside.

Once a week, I put those cans of shit out by the curb. Then, much larger shit fetchers come by my house to empty the cans of my recyclable shit and the shit that lasts forever. Then, those huge shit fetchers take my shit and the shit of my neighbors to vast holes that are filled with years worth of shit.

These vast shit holes make places like Milpitas smell like shit in the summer.

Sometimes I take shit I no longer want to be seen in or don’t use anymore and give it away so that less-capable shit fetchers (i.e. poor people) can wear or use my unwanted shit. Amazingly, I can deduct this so that I have more money to fund future shit-fetching trips.

My shit fetcher is nicer than some other people’s shit fetcher. There are people who have shit fetchers that are nicer than mine. But everyone has a shit fetcher. Even poor people. We all need something to fetch shit with. It’s what we do.

How much we spend on our shit fetchers can sometimes indicate the level of commitment each of us has to fetching shit. I have a nice shit fetcher and let me tell you, I have fetched a shitload of shit in my days.

Amazon has this great shit fetching service called Amazon Prime. You can click on the shit they have listed on thousands and thousands of pages and get it fetched for you. Your fetched shit comes in two days by UPS because Amazon Prime gives you free two day shipping. You know, so you can get your shit faster. The best thing is that someone else fetches your shit and brings it to you. Amazingly, the UPS shit fetcher is large and brown. The driver of the shit fetcher is smaller and dressed in brown clothing. This is almost incomprehensibly ironic.

Sometimes I take my shit fetcher to work. I drive to work so that I can fetch a days worth of dealing with other people’s shit.

But I put up with this shit so that I can fetch cash to pay for all my other shit fetching activities. Sometimes while I’m working or fetching more shit,I  fantasize about telling some shit-for-brains coworker to go fuck himself. It feels delicious and glorious to fantasize like this. But I’ll never do shit like this because doing so would result in a quick loss of cash, which would seriously undermine my shit fetching capabilities.

Some of the shit I fetch in my shit fetcher is stuff I eat. This turns to shit too. Then you sit on a shit sender and flush the shit that was once the shit you fetched at the store. That shit disappears down a tube and we have no idea where all that shit goes.

This shit fetching cycle is what we are all about. It’s what we do. We like to think that we are proponents of freedom. What we really do is convince other people to fetch shit like we do. We call those people “emerging markets.” What that really means is that their economies are getting big enough that a). we can make shit cheaper there and b). we can sell shit more profitably there. We will stop calling them emerging markets when all of their people have the ability to sustain the shit fetching cycle on an ever-increasing scale.

Fetching shit is what we do our whole lives. Getting old is nothing more than an ongoing state of diminished shit-fetching capacity. And when we die, we will soon be forgotten by all the remaining shit fetchers because, holy shit! there is a lot of shit fetching left to be done.

Stingray attacks man

Originally uploaded by DoctorJB

At the Human Rights Campaign, we’ve been following Itawamba student Constance McMillan’s struggle to attend prom with her girlfriend and wear the clothes of her choosing. A court decided her school was wrong to deny her attendance but stopped short of ordering them to hold the prom. So parents and private citizens offered to put on the prom, but details of that prom were mysterious and Constance wasn’t invited. Then it was reported that the mystery prom had been canceled, but that another prom would be held at a country club in nearby Fulton, MS; Constance was invited and would be going to this prom. It took place this past Friday and was attended by exactly seven students — Constance, her date and five others, plus some teachers and the principal as chaperons. How could this be? Quite simply and horribly, the event at the country club was a ‘fake’ prom and all the other students attended the ‘real’ prom at another location.

via Candace Gingrich-Jones: Prom Shocker: Constance McMillan Invited to Fake Prom.

Through FaceBook, I sometimes see that my friends got together and I wasn’t invited. I’m okay with that; I don’t expect to be included in all activities. Further, I don’t expect to be invited to parties by people who don’t like me or who don’t want to be around me. No reasonable person has this expectation.

We all select friendships, employment, affiliations and activities because they represent values we believe in.  When we choose to meet with people who share those values, we are also choosing to exclude those who do not share those values.  Those students don’t want to party with her. Is it because she’s a lesbian? Is it because she’s a strident, in-your-face GLBT advocate? Is it because she’s a bitch? Or dumb? Or uncool? Or a pothead? Or not a jock or cheerleader? Or any of the many other reasons why people — and teenagers in particular — choose to form relationships? That’s normal social behavior. Granted, in high school, those kinds of decisions are often pointed, cruel and tactless but all of us make these kinds of decisions throughout our lives.  Hopefully, as we age, we become more tactful in how we handle who we invite and how we react when not invited.

I believe there is an important question that hasn’t been asked. Why did the students and parents hide the details of the private event? Because they knew she would try to crash the party in order to advance her agenda. She is forcing an issue in a way that disrespects private friendships and networks in the interest of advancing her sexuality. Her hurt feelings are her responsibility because she refused to acknowledge that her classmates don’t accept her, don’t like her and don’t want her in their midst.  One has to ask: why does she want to be with people who don’t want to be with her? The most likely conclusion is to force people to confront and accept an issue they don’t want to deal with.

What I didn’t see in the cursory research I did today was anyone saying that McMillan is out of bounds by forcing an issue into the private realm. She was properly within her rights to oppose the school’s refusal to allow her to wear a tux and bring a female date. A public school has a responsibility to provide equal access to all school activities. The district made a decision to cancel the prom. That was a decision within the rights of administrators, even though a court said canceling the prom denied her rights (though one could wonder to what degree a school is obligated to sponsor dances). The parents and students, in response, were likewise within their rights to form their own party and exclude McMillan.

There is one important detail about the ruse prom that was missing from the write-ups I have read:  Was the ruse prom funded with school system funds? If yes, then the involvement of school employees was categorically wrong. If not, then what the school employees did may not have been considered very nice but they did not violate their responsibilities to provide equal access.

I know I will catch flak for this but I have no problem with what the parents and students did.  They faced an aggressive actor who wanted to force acceptance — with forced acceptance being no acceptance at all –  of something they didn’t want to be a part of.  They developed a strategy to block her ability to turn the prom into a social and political statement. Did it hurt her feelings? Sure but so what? We all get hurt feelings. That’s part of life.

McMillan’s insistence that she be invited to a private party is not the way to advance acceptance of her orientation. Jamming sexuality, religion and politics down peoples’ throats is not the way to bring about change. It makes the advocates of the position angry and strident, and it deepens the entrenched resistance of those who oppose the ideas. It always amazes me when people try to forcefully influence the people least likely to accept them and completely ignore the people who will be more receptive to an idea.

I’ve done this in the past with my strident opinions on the institutional church. I’d bash something that many people believe in and from which many people have derived meaningful benefit. When no one agreed with me, I’d wonder what the hell their problem was. So, I’d push it harder and louder. Surely, they will see my wisdom and insight ,I thought. Unsurprisingly, I swayed no one. So I shifted my strategy to talk with people who seemed more open about it and voila!

Change. Amazing how that happens. This is a lesson Miss McMillan needs to learn.

It was a private party. She wasn’t discriminated against. It wasn’t necessarily nice. She just isn’t liked by them. That’s all.

At this site, benignly called collateralmurder.com, a video has been posted showing a US attack against Iraqi’s.  The site describes that the video is of a US attack against Reuters reporters.  As the video begins, there is much background information that is given about the people and what you can expect to see. The intro effectively tells you how to interpret the video.  I found this video on a friend’s FaceBook page and posted the following response to it.

I think it is likely that it is incredibly difficult for us to understand the insane levels of ambiguity, uncertainty and fear that military forces experience in Iraq. They are regularly in close quarters combat and, as the video shows, many of the Iraqi combatants don’t play fair (who brings children to rescue downed comrades? The wounded children are the fault of the Iraqi’s, regardless of whether the attack was just).

From what I’ve seen over the 9 years we’ve been in Iraq, there is a lot of fault to be distributed to all the players. The Iraqi insurgents do not play according to fair standards of war and that ups the game for what the US does. Do we allow our soldiers to be exposed to unfair attacks while we keep the ethical high ground or do we counter with similar techniques?

There was a time when attacking civilian targets was heinous. The Germans changed that in WWII. We escalated our efforts against that nation in a similar fashion and then bombed the bejeesus out of Japan before we nuked them.… See More

My point is that it’s very easy for us to watch some video and come to a judgment about what it means ethically. What we lack is an experiential awareness of the context those soldiers and their leaders operate within. It looks like they fabricated the weapons of the Iraqi’s in order to get permission from command to attack but we had the benefit of knowing who the Iraqi’s were before the video started. That biases our interpretation of the video.

How might each of us respond if we were in close quarters with combatants who look like civilians, whose women and children are willing to be combatants, whose IEDs have killed and maimed our brothers in arms in settings where there should be a higher degree of safety? Would we play it safe and expose ourselves to confirm absolutely that the thing strapped across the shoulder of a man was a camera or a grenade launcher? Playing it safe has been found to be a quick way to get killed.

Now, if you’re an Iraqi and you were just a normal person caught up in a horrible war that has been in play for nine years, wouldn’t you be careful about how you might appear to patrols? Would you sling large objects over your shoulder? Would you drive a rescue van into a known attack zone and bring kids along?

And does it matter that they were Reuters photographers? Again, being biased before the video is shown creates outrage. But Iraqi combatants have consistently played deadly games of subterfuge with our soldiers. Iraqi insurgents are willing to violate terms of engagement in order to kill more soldiers. They lack our firepower so they have to resort to deception.

If you’re a solder, how can you tell the difference? And whose life are you willing to put at risk that you made the right call?

Watch the video again but put out of your mind what you already know about it. Do you come to the same conclusion?

As an aside, if you haven’t already, check out Hurt Locker. There are some scenes that give a visceral sense of the kinds of decisions soldiers need to make in a split-second with serious consequences.

Forget about the adrenalin-seeking motives of the main character and watch the movie from the perspective of fear, uncertainty, doubt and anger.