The really sad part of this is that this D-Bag doesn’t see anything wrong with what he did. He considers calling the President-Elect the “Magic Negro” to be political satire.

[Begin Sarcasm]

Seriously… and I’m speaking to all my conservative family and friends who have partially disowned me over my support of Obama, THIS IS WHY THE REPUBLICAN’S LOST — fix it, get rid of this a-hole and others like him, or count on many dissapointing years to come.

From CNN Politics: “A candidate for the Republican National Committee chairmanship said Friday the CD he sent committee members for Christmas — which included a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” — was clearly intended as a joke.

“I think most people recognize political satire when they see it,” Tennessee Republican Chip Saltsman told CNN. “I think RNC members understand that.”

The song, set to the tune of “Puff the Magic Dragon,” was first played on conservative political commentator Rush Limbaugh’s radio show in 2007.

Saltsman was national campaign manager for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s presidential bid in 2007 and 2008. Before that, he held a variety of posts, including a number of positions under former Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee.”

So… I’m sick right now… really sick… and I’ve kinda been counting on the ceiling fan to keep me from drowning in my own sweat and snot. (Yeah… Pretty ‘aint it!) — Anyway, around 6:50pm tonite all the power in the house went out… except for my wireless EVDO router and my laptop. It’s kinda strange to be surfing the net at broadband speeds while most of the island is in darkness and out house is being list mostly by candles….

As of right now I still don’t see any lights in the neighboring hills Hmmmm… maybe I should be conserving power?

From the Honolulu Advertisers: “A major power outage has left much of O’ahu in the dark tonight, disrupting outgoing flights, post-Christmas shoppers at malls and thousands of residents.

President-elect Barack Obama is staying on Oahu and a radio report said his compound had lights, perhaps from emergency generators.

Power went out about 6:50 p.m. downtown, and earlier at some places, such as Pearlridge Center.

The outage came as a lightning storm rolled across the island.

City spokesman Bill Brennan said the city has activated the Emergency Operations Center.

Hawaiian Electric told KSSK radio that the power “may be off for a while.” A transformer may have been hit by lightening, according to a radio report.”

I don’t take credit for this… it’s just something that I received in a junk email… but it’s bitingly true.

Once upon a time a man appeared in a village and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each.

The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10 and, as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He next announced that he would now buy monkeys at $20 each. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again. Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so scarce it was an effort to even find a monkey, let alone catch it! The man now announce d that he would buy monkeys at $50 each! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would buy on his behalf. In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers: ‘Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has already collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each.’

The villagers rounded up all their savings and bought all the monkeys for 700 billion dollars.

They never saw the man or his assistant again, only lots and lots of monkeys!

We just finished our Christmas vigil masses and I have to say I’m a bit bushed. Still, I couldn’t close off the night (before getting up to do it all over again!) without wishing everybody out there the Merriest Christmas and a wonderful (and hopeful) New Year!

The other day I was travelling through Las Vegas and I noticed something intersting in the terminal. For a while now they’ve had one of those Apple proudct vending machines… you know… kinda like a candy dispenser but instead of a $1.25 for a pile of sugar, you could pay $800 for a new entertainment system. — Anyway, this time I noticed that they have not one, but TWO of these machines.

Really? Seriously? Is the market for impulse buying of overpriced consumer electronics really that hot?

I’m a 49′er faithful… that means that I stick by my team, no matter how much they might stink it up at the moment. Still, even I am at a loss for words when the best defensive play we come up with all year happens to involve a person on the field who isn’t on our team.

More after the Jump »

This is a natural, no-brainer decision… Take an idea from the “greenest” (as in efficient tech) state, roll it out in the “geeniest” (as in tropical) state and see if we can’t make something happen.

With Hawaii, the technology and the plan get a much smaller geographical location, a guaranteed “in bounds” car population and a relatively well-developed electric grid. — I for one am ready to see how this will work.

From the NYTimes: “The State of Hawaii and the Hawaiian Electric Company on Tuesday endorsed an effort to build an alternative transportation system based on electric vehicles with swappable batteries and an “intelligent” battery recharging network.

The plan, the brainchild of the former Silicon Valley software executive Shai Agassi, is an effort to overcome the major hurdles to electric cars — slow battery recharging and limited availability.

By using existing electric car technologies, coupled with an Internet-connected web of tens of thousands of recharging stations, he thinks his company, Better Place L.L.C. of Palo Alto, Calif., will make all-electric vehicles feasible.”

If you’re at all interested in the law, you know that the last few years have seen ridiculously seemingly frivolous lawsuits that were the seemed to defy the seriousness of the law. There was the ongoing saga of Jack Thompson, whose entire life seemed to be one big laughable lawsuit, only ending when he received lifetime disbarment. Then there was the SCO vs. Linux (aka SCO vs. Reality) debacle in which a little company in the middle of Mormon country decided to sue such industry lightweights as IBM, Novell, General Motors, only to end up fighting with their own lawyers for the spare change that used to be their $100 Million + war chest

Even though those cases collected much more ire from legal eagles and uberGeeks alike, I dare somebody to come up with a better example of lawsuit frivolity and abuse of power than can be found in the singular case of a (now) former administrative judge in D.C. who sued his neighborhood cleaners for $67 million because they lost a pair of his pants.

Now drama addicts know that hubris makes for a great story, and I don’t think there was any greater hubris than Mr. Pearson insisting on his bat-shit-digngly lawsuit even when all of his friends, colleagues AND ENEMIES were trying to help him see exactly how far down the crazy-train his plans were.

He’s lost his wife, his job, any credibility he may have had and now it seems as if he is the SCO of sad, pathetic loners… filing appeal after appeal rather than having to deal with the reality of having destroyed his life over a pair of slacks.

Today Apple made the announcement that Jobs will NOT be giving the keynote address at Macworld, the annual gathering of all things Apple. The company is trying to downplay his absence by saying that Apple is pulling out of the show altogether in 2010 and it doesn’t make sense to commit their CEO to speak.

Of course that explanation is complete bunk…

More after the Jump »

More after the Jump »

Here’s a interesting little article about a case against a serial rapist in Santa Cruz, California that was derailed by a bad DVD recording. One of the victims of the rapist has given an interview to police that was recorded onto disk. This interview was to become a central part of the case against the rapist, but between the time of the recording and the trial te DVD became unreadable. — The rapist is about to go free, the police are at a loss… enter the geeks!

From Computerworld: “Two local data recovery firms had already said the videotaped interview on the DVD was unrecoverable. But by chance, Isaac’s parents had a neighbor who was a retired Seagate employee. Having heard of Seagate, Isaac decided to contact the company about a medium they didn’t even manufacture, hoping they could recover the data.

Seagate’s i365 subsidiary has a data recovery service — Seagate Recovery Services (SRS) — that took on the job of trying to bring the November 2006 police interview back to life. SRS loaded the DVD into a player, but “there was nothing on the DVD.

“Our analysis showed there to be damage to the lead-in section of the data,” Keith Gnagey, vice president of professional services for i365, said in an e-mail statement about the recovery effort. That meant any attempt “with normal playing software would not be able to get past the beginning of the data.” But once SRS extracted an image of the data from the DVD, it was able to repair the damaged lead-in portion of the DVD, making the data — which had always been intact — viewable.

Once the DVD was restored, prosecutors had the evidence they needed to charge Barnes with multiple rapes involving three different women. Barnes was sentenced to 24 years in prison on Dec. 5.”

From Fox News: “The Herald quoted the information minister, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, as blaming cholera on “serious biological chemical war … a genocidal onslaught on the people of Zimbabwe by the British.”

“Cholera is a calculated racist terrorist attack on Zimbabwe by the unrepentant former colonial power which has enlisted support from its American and Western allies so that they invade the country,” Ndlovu was quoted as saying.

Experts, however, blame the epidemic on Zimbabwe’s economic collapse. The World Health Organization said Friday the death toll was at 792 and that the number of cholera cases that have been reported since the outbreak began in August was now 16,700. The epidemic has reached a fatality rate of 4.7 percent. To be under control it would have to be less than 1 percent, WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib said Friday.”

I was waiting for this to happen… I just wonder why it took so long.

I mean, the government of Zimbabwe has blamed everything from food shortages to their economic collapse to a skyrocketing mortality rate on the West. Why did it take so long for them to lay the cholera outbreak on an outside party? It couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that Mugabe’s land redistribution program has destroyed nearly all of the country’s farmland, or that government corruption has allowed the privelledged to freely trade in foreign currency while the average citizen is limited to withdrawing just enough money each day to buy 1/16th a loaf of bread, or that they chased away or killed their most skilled teachers/doctors and professionals. — Natually the cholera outbreak must be the result of a bio-attack on their country rather than the breakdown of even the most basic services in this once-prosperous nation.

I haven’t yet had a chance to read the document, but I am interested in learning if they have actually done their homework by looking at the issues before they make ethical judgements… unfortunately we don’t always get the order right.

From Live Science: “The Vatican raised its opposition to embryonic stem cell research, the morning-after pill, in vitro fertilization and human cloning to a new level Friday in a major new document on bioethics.

But in the document, the Vatican also said it approved of some forms of gene therapy and encouraged stem cell research using adult cells. And it said parents could in good conscience inoculate their children with vaccines produced with cells derived from aborted fetuses.

The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued “The Dignity of a Person” to answer bioethical questions that have emerged in the two decades since its last such document was published.

With it, the Vatican has essentially confirmed in a single, authoritative instruction the opinions of the Pontifical Academy for Life, a Vatican advisory body that has debated these issues for years.”

In my experience there are two types of people, those who hate writing holiday greeting cards, and those who hate writing holiday greeting cards but get such a big head-start on writing them because they like the feeling the receive by saying “I sent out all my cards in October!” (Ok… I guess you can add to that the people who take pictures of their pets and send them to family members and those who actually write something of substance in their greetings.)

Well the folks at YouTube want to give you another option. They’ve brought back the “YouTube Greeting card” — essentially an easy way to send season’s greetings with either a canned video or one that you’ve made yourself. Now instead of writing a generic 1-page letter that you’ll print up and send to the entire family, you can customize each video to the family, friend, enemy, total stranger you want to reach out to this Christmas!

From YouTube: “To create your card, visit the YouTube Greeting Cards site where you can choose from dozens of holiday videos uploaded by the YouTube community. Or if you prefer, send a greeting video of your own – either select a video that you’ve previously uploaded or record a brand new one. For your convenience, we’ve also added a link on every YouTube watch page under the “share options” section so you can send any embeddable video on YouTube as a greeting card.

After you’ve selected your video, pick a theme, type in your personal message, enter the recipients’ email addresses, and voila – instant holiday cheer.

And if you’re in need of music for a video you’ve uploaded, we’ve recently added many holiday songs to our AudioSwap catalog.

Save trees, save money, and spread joy - all from the comfort of your home.

Happy Holidays!

The YuleTube Team”

It was only a few days ago that Zimbabwe released $100 Million and $200 Million dollar bills to combat the insanity that is their 231% Million inflation. I wonder how long it will be before they realize that just continuing their failed economic/political policies at a higher volume is doomed no matter how much they increase their currency denominations. — (Then again… right now the US is in no position to pontificate about responsible economic policy.)

From CNN: “Zimbabwe has had higher denominations than the $500 million note in the past. But over the past two years, the country has slashed zeros from the amount of its worthless currency — the latest being 10 zeros in August. Once one of Africa’s most promising economies, Zimbabwe is reeling under its worst humanitarian and economic crisis. A cholera outbreak has killed nearly 800 Zimbabweans, forcing hundreds to cross the border into South Africa and Botswana to seek treatment. The situation has been exacerbated by the closure of government hospitals for more than a month as health personnel demand the government review their salaries and equip the hospitals with medicines and modern machinery.”