Jeff Hoy, American

…the next time you’re in Colorado DO NOT pretend to be a former Denver Bronco.  There’s a lot of other stuff you won’t get locked up for, but if you tell people that you once played for the Broncos, then we’ll throw the book at you.

…when BreakEFX talked about “youth outreach and K-12 involvement…“

Maybe all those Somali pirates should start setting up radio stations now instead of hijacking ships.

Cause it seems there isn’t much “liberty” left in NYC.

So now a state assemblyman and NYC’s mayor Bloomberg seem to think it’s a good idea to ban restaurants from using salt in their cooking… BAN SALT!  IN FOOD!  Are they serious?!  These two men should be stripped of their positions of power.  I lived in upstate New York for a few years, now I’m glad I left.

Welcome to the nanny state.  Rice, bread, and water for all!  Anything else would be “unhealthy” and the government knows YOU can’t make the right decisions about YOUR life.

Tax or ban, whatever they need to do to “look out” for you.

To steal a line from Kathy Shaidle, a more appropriate title for this article would be “A few stupid kids ruin some cool toys for everyone.”

The propaganda was right!

PITTSBURGH (AP) – A San Francisco man claims he was high on a double dose of medical marijuana cookies when he screamed, dropped his pants and attacked crew members on a cross-country flight, forcing its diversion to Pittsburgh, the FBI said Wednesday.

Tell Your Children!

This story reminds me of something I said at Christmas.

I’m not a psychologist, but I’ve witnessed what your writer from BC refers to as “learned helplessness” over here in Afghanistan.  Example: this past summer I visited a small village near the PAK border where the people had absolutely no water and were relying on a local road construction crew to fill their various pots, pans, and jugs, which they left on the side of the road to be filled on a bi-weekly basis.  These people had a well, but the simple pump system had broken.  Rather than attempt to fix it (from what I understand, they had been shown how to do repairs when the well was built by the PRT some years before) or scrape together some money to hire someone to fix it, they simply sat around in 120 degree heat for months, waiting for someone to come help.  A US patrol noticed the buckets by the side of the road and stopped by to investigate.  I strongly suspect that had we not stopped to ask what was going on, there’s no telling how long those people would have gone on being thirsty and filthy.  If these guys couldn’t figure out a permanent fix for a basic human need like water, I’m quite sure goat farming would be far too complex of a task for them to master.

I have an aunt that was in the peace corps when she was a youngster.  She spent time in Africa doing peace corps things, whatever that involves.  But that was long ago.  She hasn’t given up on Africa though and for a long time one of the things she did was at Christmas, instead of  buying gifts for everybody she made donations to relief groups in our names.  Noble indeed.  For a few years we were giving villages goats.  Now all I could think was that with as many goats as we’d given to them, they should have been able to set up a sustainable breeding program.  But nope, we kept giving them more goats.

My aunt has since moved on to making donations to other groups in our names now.  For instance, I ( a proud Iraq War veteran, member of the military, and supporter of the war on terror) have been making “donations” to an anti war group and known abetter of military deserting cowards for the last couple years.

In an article on the Ars gaming blog, Opposable Thumbs, titled Let’s talk about sex… in video games the author drops this question in the third paragraph of the intro.

But why do people in the game industry get so upset about anything sexual appearing in games, especially when there is so much gratuitous violence permeating the medium? Why doesn’t violence in games spark the same amount of outrage?

Perhaps the author has been living under a rock during the past few months and completely missed the CoD: Modern Warfare 2 terrorist killing innocent civilians controversy.  Or maybe the many Grand Theft Auto controversies.  Or the Soldier of Fortune controversies.  Or the Terminator 2 Arcade cop killing controversy.  Or the Mortal Kombat and Night Trap Senate hearings, which was primarily responsible for the whole video game ratings system to begin with.  And maybe, just maybe he’s never heard of retired Lt. Col.  Dave Grossman or disbarred lawyer Jack Thompson.  That’s really just the tip of the iceberg.

To say people are more outraged by the relatively new phenomenon of sex in video games than they are by violence in video games is to completely ignore the last two decades of video game history.

And if you continue reading the article you see that the quotes he picks out seem to negate his premise that people freak out about sex but don’t about violence.

[Damon Brown] pointed out “For instance, how many mainstream cover stories have there been on violence in video games and the effect on children, à la Columbine? Comparatively, there have been hardly any about adult/sexual content, even during the Hot Coffee scandal.”

…does it stop being art, and start being propaganda?

Why is the National Endowment for the Arts now the official propaganda wing of the White House?

A commenter going by “twistedmerkin” at the Reason blog Hit & Run commenting on an Earth Day related blog post.

Yeah, yeah, sure. We’re raping Gaia.  But she had it coming, with her prominently displayed mountains and gaping canyons.