toastykitten

Because how else would it explain:

Jeff Zients throwing a "morale-booster" party for Biden staffers upset about Israel/Palestine, which by the way, was disrupted by protesters telling them to quit their job and call for a ceasefire. 

Asking China to intervene with the Houthis that the US is currently bombing, and somehow being surprised that China is just taking advantage of the current situation and basically telling the US "that's your biz, stop your hostilities, then". ForeignPolicy had some analysis on China's support of the Palestinians. I don't know how this isn't intensely humiliating or embarrassing for the US. And also by attacking them they are somehow uniting more groups who would have been enemies at other times. 

Trying to send a campaign manager to a swing state to convince the Arabs you're on their side, and their only choice besides Trump without calling for a ceasefire or even mentioning the deaths of Palestinians in the last public statement made about the genocide. Everyone refuses to meet anyway. 

College admissions scandals are the gifts that keep on giving. Apparently, there's another UCLA cheating scandal, this time involving Chinese nationals and ABCs taking their tests for them. Even in the scamming industry, minorities still get paid a fraction of what white people charge for the same services.


"They were paid about $400 to $1,000 each time they sat for an exam, said Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Kyle Ryan. [Compared to $10,000 to $75,000 allegedly charged per test in that other college cheating scandal that broke this week.]"

 Not even bothering with the html. 

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/13/trump-demands-aides-strengthen-china-tariffs-460416
https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/973623540384718848
https://investigaterussia.org/media/2018-01-31/pompeo-and-coats-met-top-russian-spies-dc

If Dreamwidth had emojis, I would just fill up the post with the eyeroll one.

I don't ever want to hear another complaint from anyone about how affirmative action takes away jobs from deserving white men.

I have zero sympathy for the editor, although the notes are hilarious. 

He got a conservative to defend fat people. Every chapter is literally titled "Why X Group Hates Me".

He misquotes Shakespeare and then in the next sentence brags about how brilliant he is. The whole book is like some 30 year old's slam book of all the people he thinks hate him when nobody actually cares that much.

Also, it's boring and repetitive.

Husband Takes Wife's Last Name On Driver's License after THREE years. Via LAist.

I am so sick of the iPhone. Yes, it'll change everything forever, with the nifty rotating browser! But how does it work, as a PHONE? Is the reception good? Do your calls get dropped?

I just finished reading this Wired article on Hans Reiser, the Linux programmer who's accused of murdering his wife. The whole thing is really strange. Three items I thought were odd, in a really bizarre article: The author describes the Oakland hills as "quiet and idyllic". Uh, quiet, maybe. Idyllic, no. He also mentions that Reiser first met his wife in Russia, where he had been several times previously using the Russian bride service. Okaaay. Three: Reiser has this obsession with manhood, and thought that teaching his son to play violent video games (which his wife objected to) would help prepare him to be "a man", because he otherwise wouldn't get that kind of education living in Oakland. (That is so funny I don't even know where to begin.)

Oh my god you know how I was bitching about our government and their stupid "English-is-the-official-national-language" thing? Apparently England has this thing where they offer free English classes to migrants, although they are considering limiting access. *sigh* And then I read that people are getting pissed off about having to "press 1 for English". Are you kidding me? Are you really that frickin lazy? And dumb?

We recently watched Sid and Nancy, which was a movie about Sid Vicious and his turbulent relationship with his groupie girlfriend. Neither of us know anything about the Sex Pistols, so we were both sort of befuddled when they cut to him not singing or actually playing any instruments while on stage. Maybe the movie itself is technically good, but I found it really hard to care about the title characters, because to me they both seemed like really unlikeable people who just screamed everything they thought. (And also mentally ill with no one to give them proper medication.) I thought Nancy seemed like a low-rent Courtney Love, and then I found out via Wikipedia that she did want to play the role, claiming that she "is Nancy Spungen". I mean, do you you really want to admit that you are a drug-addled groupie?

I'm almost done reading Extreme Cuisine: The Weird & Wonderful Foods That People Eat, by Jerry Hopkins. The foreword, of course, is written by Anthony Bourdain. There's some interesting stuff in here, but I doubt I will ever come up with the willpower to make myself eat ant salad, even if some varieties of ants "taste like honey".

I thought about the arguments that vegans make about how eating meat is immoral. I am not going to make any moral judgments about that, but I'm wondering about how vegans would suggest managing overpopulation of certain species? For example, crocodile and alligator meat were once banned, but once they started regaining their population, they had to be managed, and crocodile farms were born - for leather, meat, etc.

Hopkins makes a lot of arguments for adding other species to our diet as a "protein source", but I'm wondering why we even need to add another protein source. From all I've heard and read, most Americans consume too much protein anyway.

Amusing to me is the fact that the most befuddling items of consumption were started by the Chinese. Who the hell thinks up shit like bird's nest and thousand-year eggs (not actually a thousand years old)? Apparently, we do. (But I'm still American enough that I always turn that shit down.)

Man, I wish Livejournal would just get it together already.

I think I might go back to having my own site - when I have time to figure it out.

I just found out that Amazon has an entire section devoted to Hong Kong Category III films.

Lost Mitten's Etsy Shop full of Nintendo crafty stuff is awesome.

HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux - I especially like 3.3 - Don't Call Women Bitches. You would think that's obvious, but apparently not.

I've been completely riveted by the story of the fake Stanford student that was just discovered. I wonder what's going to happen to her now.

Immigrants from China, India and the Philippines in particular must wait longer than most other immigrants to bring in family members because their countrymen have tended to fill the annual immigration quotas for their countries more quickly than immigrants from other countries. - Okay, this explains why my family had to wait so goddamn long to bring my aunts and uncles over. The rest of the article is an informative if depressing read about why the new proposed immigration bill will really, really suck for Asian immigrants and their families. *sigh*

A cat shooting game.

Maxine Hong Kingston was on the latest guest on the Bill Moyers Journal. They talked about her writing and meditation workshops for veterans of war. Some of the writing has been collected into a book called Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. I thought it was a very touching episode, and it was interesting to hear her talk. I didn't realize how old she was - she mentioned growing up during World War II and watching relatives in uniform go off to war. It hit me - she's about or as old as my dad, then. How strange.