If you drive along Interstate 80 through Nebraska, you'll see a lot of wheat fields, a lot of corn fields, and very little else.

If you keep at it, and drive until you feel the endless flat landscape pressing against your sanity like Nyarlathotep descending on a tasty morsel of virgin consciousness, you'll reach exit 382.

There's nothing there, really. A golf cart store, a gas station, a sign advertising an inn that's been closed for years...that's about it. There is also, just to the north of the interstate and a little more than a quarter of a mile from the exit, the ruins of a tiny wooden church, collapsing into decay.

The church itself is here:



When we drove past the church, I had no choice but to stop and photograph it. The ruins are beautiful beyond all comprehension. It's a pretty hard slog from the exit, through thick brush, and a barbed-wire fence along the interstate prevented me from getting behind it. Plus, I got ticks while getting these pictures. Ticks! *shudders*

As I was taking these, I was wishing desperately for a better digital camera. Some of these pictures would make awesome posters, but sadly, my first-generation DSLR simply doesn't offer the resolution for poster-sized printing.



( Clicky here for more! )

From the depths of Victorian sexual prudery comes this device, the Lawson's Vaginal Washer, designed to clean the inside of one's vagina by means of a perforated water-spraying tube surrounded by--and I shudder to say this--rotating squeegee scrapers.

I can think of about a dozen uses for this in a BDSM context right off the top of my head. Just over half of them involve joreth. That brings two questions to mind:

1. Anyone know some person in the Portland/Seattle area with the necessary craft skills to build one of these?

and

2. Hey joreth, when are you coming to visit?

Michael Jackson is scarcely a few days dead and the malware writers are hard at work using the news of his death to spread computer viruses.

This morning I received an email telling me (in Spanish) that there was a YouTube video of Michael's death on the Internet, and I could see it (oh boy!) by visiting

http://youtubemichaelj.com

*** WARNING *** WARNING *** WARNING ***
This site is live as of the time of this writing. DO NOT visit this site if you don't know what you're doing. This site WILL attempt to download a Windows virus onto your computer.

The Web site looks just like YouTube, and presents a phony blank movie player image with a "An error occurred, please try again later" message in it, then attempts a drive-by download from

http://youtubemichaelj.com/Codec/120.exe

The download is a bit unwieldy for malware (1.8 MB in size)--much too large to be a variant on Zlob, Asprox, or any of the other malware commonly distributed as phony movie-player CODECs. I don't believe I've seen this particular malware before.

The registration information is most likely bogus. The site was registered yesterday:

whois youtubemichaelj.com

Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain Name: YOUTUBEMICHAELJ.COM
Registrar: DOMAINPEOPLE, INC.
Whois Server: whois.domainpeople.com
Referral URL: http://www.domainpeople.com
Name Server: A.DNS.HOSTWAY.NET
Name Server: B.DNS.HOSTWAY.NET
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Updated Date: 29-jun-2009
Creation Date: 29-jun-2009
Expiration Date: 29-jun-2010

Registrant:
Tawny Grant (youtubemichaelj.com)
203 Christopher Columbus Drive

Jersey City, NJ 07302
US

Registrar: DomainPeople Inc.

Domain Name: youtubemichaelj.com
Created on .............2009-06-29-14.36.03.127000
Expires on .............2010-06-29-14.36.03.000000
Record last updated on .
Status .................ACTIVE

Administrative Contact:
Tawny Grant
Tawny Grant
203 Christopher Columbus Drive

Jersey City, NJ
07302, US
+1.9174149468
dldeborah579@gmail.com

The site's hosted on Hostway. Hostway is an unusual choice for a virus dropping site; they're fairly clean, and a bit pricey. I suspect that the site will be disabled soon.

Given the choice of hosting companies and the size of the malware download, I am wondering if the people responsible for this malware aren't fairly new to the game. More experienced malware and virus writers, like the Zlob gang, prefer to host on hacked sites, screen their hosts behind a network of redirectors, and store the actual payload itself on servers in Eastern Europe.

On the trip out to Portland from Atlanta, I made a point to pass through Venango, Nebraska, the tiny farm town where I grew up.

I've posted about Venango before, with a Google Earth view of the house I lived in. This time, I was able to pay the house a visit at ground level. zaiah and I spent about three hours wandering around with a camera, and it brought back some half-submerged memories.

We spent the night before in a hotel in Ogallala, Nebraska, the nearest town with amenities like hotels and restaurants. Ogallala is about an hour and a half from Venango; I remember making the trip as a kid on those rare occasions when we wanted to do something like eat out at McDonald's.

One of Ogallala's features is this water tower, painted to look like a flying saucer. At night, a ring of lights around the walkway flashes. I'd entirely forgotten about this water tower, and was a little surprised to find that, thirty years later, it was still there. (And, from the looks of it, with a fresh coat of paint.)

There's something appropriate about this icon. In small Nebraska communities, anyone who hasn't been living there for several generations might as well be an alien. I can remember a kid I went to grade school with being regarded as an "outsider" because his family had only been there for a couple of generations.

As you can probably imagine, I blended in like a squirrel in a den of velociraptors. The notion that I was an alien was only made all the more stark because I didn't like football, wheat, or playing football in wheat fields.

Instead, I launched model rockets in wheat fields. I also had the only computer in town (an antique Radio Shack TRS-80 that was state of the art at the time). There was a guy in a similar small town about three hours away (Brandon, Colorado) who had an Apple II computer.

Needless to say, we knew each other.



This is Venango as seen from the main (and only) highway into town. The big white structure, for those of you who aren't farmers, is a grain elevator, where vast quantities of wheat can be stored before being shipped out by truck or rail.

The last time I saw these elevators was almost precisely thirty years ago. From the looks of them, they haven't been painted in that entire time. At least they're all still there; every so often, some damn fool walks into a grain elevator with a lit cigarette and blows the entire thing into low earth orbit (note to mad scientists on my flist: grain dust is explosive, yo).



This is the main street through the center of town. The grain elevators can be seen from almost every angle everywhere in town.

Normally, at this point in the post, I'd talk about some pleasant or funny little anecdote about growing up in this place, but I really don't have one.



This is where I went to school. This building housed everyone from kindergarten through high school.

In my memories, the schoolhouse is huge; the reality is quite tiny. The first thing you see when you pass through those double doors is an enormous, dark polished wooden staircase leading up. That staircase still, to this day, features in some of my dreams.

Not that anyone has passed through those doors in a while. When the population of Venango started to fall shortly after we left, the school was closed. It's been about fifteen years since the last time anyone has been there. The front lawn is still beautifully manicured, but nobody uses the building for anything. zaiah observed that an enterprising person who wanted to form an intentional community here could probably buy the place for a song and move in a dozen families or so, which would probably be the largest influx of residents in at least five decades.



The back of the school isn't as nicely manicured.

One of the eerie things about this pace is that there are no children. Anywhere. We visited on a gorgeous, breezy summer midmorning, and no kids. We saw people walking around the town, we saw folks working at the grain elevator, but no kids. Had there been any, anywhere, I've got to believe that some of them would use this playground, but nothing. Ours were the only footprints. The playground equipment is covered with a fine dusting of rust. Nobody plays here. You could film zombie apocalypse movies here. It was weird.

Just as eerie is the fact that the place looks like it was just closed yesterday. When we looked through the windows, we saw all the trophies still in the trophy cases, and the cafeteria had a deep freezer whose lid was propped open with a Styrofoam cup. It gives the uncanny impression of having been closed for the summer and then never approached again.

My father worked here as a teacher (K-8), and as the athletics coach, and as the bus driver. The number of trophies in the cabinet was always a little surprising, as Venango was infamous for fielding the worst teams ever seen in any sport; our football team, for example, scored a combined total of six points for the entire season the last year I was there. We barely had enough students to have a football team; if one guy was sick, they didn't play.



I swear this is the same mat they had in front of the door when I was a kid, now crumpled up beside the school and with weeds growing through it. Go panthers!

And speaking of team spirit:



This is, or was, the basketball court and football field behind the school. Each clump of trees you see off in the distance marks a house. The trees are planted as windbreaks and snowbreaks, to prevent wind-driven snow from burying the houses. Yes, I'm being serious.



The view from the front of the school toward the grain elevators. Everything in this town is centered on those grain elevators; without them, there's no reason for the town to exist.

In the last thirty years, the town's population has dropped from 242 to 167. Even with the grain elevators, one could argue that there's no reason for the town to exist.



This is the road I grew up on. The clump of trees on the right is my old house; we drove past it on our first attempt to find it, so this is the view back toward the highway from the road. And finally:



The house I grew up in. From here, I played with my computer, launched model rockets, flew kites, built a huge hydroponics garden that was eventually taken over by spider plants, and generally stayed the hell away from the other townsfolk and their football-in-wheat-field ways. Place looks a little worse for the wear; the past few decades have not been kind.

We didn't stop. I don't care who's living there now. I'm just happy it isn't me.

I spent the afternoon (well, part of it, anyway) playing with a gaggle of several-week-old Tonkinese kittens. These kittens tend to be social and gregarious, and like snuggling together in piles of cuteness which are called, I shit you not, "tonk piles".

These guys are totally fearless and love crawling all over people, which is enough cute to drop a charging rhino in its tracks. They're a cross-breed of Siamese and Burmese cats, without the Siamese neurosis.

Yes, they're that cute. Yes, you're jealous.

Tomorrow begins the unpacking.

Well, err, at least in theory. zaiah has a job interview tomorrow that's going to take up a good part of the day. But those of you who volunteered to help, I will likely be taking you up on those offers at some point late tomorrow afternoon or early tomorrow evening.

We made the unfortunate mistake of stopping at Fry's on the way in, so now I have a toy radio controlled helicopter. (Curse you, Fry's! Curse you!)

Liam is happy to be out of the truck, and seems more than willing to give zaiah's dog the what-for. He's now entirely noctournal; he slept most of the day in the truck (at least after he quit letting us know that he would much prefer to have remained in the hotel room for the day) and no doubt will keep me up all night.

Pushed through 663 miles yesterday, including a detour around Salt Lake City to avoid attack by revenant Mormonoids from the Deep.

Liam woke up very, very cranky, oh yes he did. It wasn't until after we'd had breakfast that he finally calmed down. He spent the entire night (yes, the entire night!) chasing a moth around the hotel room, and I think he was sad to see it go.

Stopped for gas in Bliss, Idaho. There's a false advertising lawsuit just waiting there, in case you were wondering. I've seen more bliss at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

In about five hours, we'll be in Portland!

Not many folks know this, but at the end of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln was cloned.

The clone was genetically modified to gigantic proportions, then immediately frozen in Carbonite. Once his life signs were stable, the gigantic clone of Abraham Lincoln was transported to Laramie, Wyoming, where he would remain in storage until the zombie apocalypse.

When that day comes, Lincoln will be free of his Carbonite shell, ready to offer his leadership to save the Union once again. Folks around these parts sleep easier knowing that Lincoln stands ever ready, prepared once more to save us all.

Definitely in the home stretch now. Covered 471 miles today, including a jog to Venango, Nebraska, the town where I grew up. It was interesting to revisit Venango for the first time in 29 years; it re-awoke memories I barely even knew I still had.

Liam is now almost totally adapted to life on the road, and is starting to enjoy the trip almost as much as zaiah and I are.

Yes! More bandwidth crushing! Today's installment: Des Moines to Ogallala. 461 miles, two photo ops, one giant tacky buffalo, many weird freaky-ass catfish, and an ice cream sandwich.

Posted from a cheap hotel in Des Moines, Iowa. God bless teh free Interwebs.

Bandwidth-crushing image, I know. Liam has been handling the move amazingly well so far!

If you don't play World of Warcraft, move along, nothing to see here.

If you DO play World of Warcraft, then this is some funny shit, yo. Having played both a paladin and a warlock, I can absolutely attest that, like life, ( it's funny because it's true )

Exactly one week from today, I will be on the road to Portland. I'll be moving in with zaiah and turning my life (and hers, it must be said) upside down.

A while ago, I wrote about an outfit called a2b2.net, which was hosting a number of phony PayPal and bank sites designed to dupe people into giving up their financial information.

A short time later, that particular server went offline, only to come back a few days later as a site that sold and distributed software for hacking Web servers and setting up phony bank and PayPal sites.

Well, now things take a turn for the strange. It appears that Web host has been hacked, and every Web site running on the entire Web host has been wiped.

Hm. When you go to bed with monsters...

Uncompressing kernel......done.
Loading kernel...........................

FRANKLIN version 8.4(1) loaded. Good morning!

Loading sex drive framework....done.
Current arousal level is 8 (0-9)

Loading soundtrack...done.
Current music playing inside your head is:
VNV Nation, Standing

Loading device drivers.............. *FAILED*
Loading device drivers.............. *FAILED*
Loading device drivers.............. *FAILED*
Throttling respawn
Loading device drivers.............. *FAILED*
Loading device drivers.............. *FAILED*
Loading device drivers.............. *FAILED*
Loading device drivers.............. *FAILED*
Note: Last message repeated 47 times

Loading device drivers..............done.
Probing devices:
Found 2 arm(s)
Found 2 leg(s)
Found 1 head(s)
*** WARNING: Head hurts, skipping further integrity checks
Found 1 sex organ(s)
Note: Current arousal level changed to 9 (0-9)

Loading speech centers... *FAILED*
Will retry in background

Registered new device: hands
Registered new device: feet
Registered new device: nose
*** WARNING: nose hurts, loading diagnostic
Registered new device: eyes
Initializing visual centers...... *FAILED*
Initializing visual centers...... *FAILED*
Initializing visual centers...... *FAILED*
Note: Last message repeated 16 times
Initializing visual centers...... done, loading object recognition framework
*** WARNING: nose hurts, loading diagnostic
*** WARNING: nose hurts, loading diagnostic

Initializing to-do list... done
Note: "Go pee" moved to top of to-do list
Note: "Go pee" urgency changed to 7 (0-9)
Loading speech centers... *FAILED*
Will retry in background

Current runlevel is now 1
*** WARNING: nose hurts, loading diagnostic
*** WARNING: nose hurts, loading diagnostic
Initializing object recognition framework..............done.
Identified 1 object(s): pillow
Identified 1 object(s): pillow
Identified 1 object(s): pillow
Identified 1 object(s): pillow
Identified 1 object(s): cat
Identified 1 object(s): blanket
*** WARNING: cat is biting nose
*** WARNING: cat is biting nose
Note: Last message repeated 15 times
Note: "Go pee" urgency changed to 8 (0-9)
Loading speech centers... *FAILED*
Will retry in background

Current runlevel is now 2
*** WARNING: nose hurts, loading diagnostic
*** WARNING: cat is biting nose
Loading motor control.......done.
Note: "Move cat" moved to top of to-do list
Note: "Move cat" urgency changed to 9 (0-9)
Loading speech centers...done
Note: "Go pee" urgency changed to 9 (0-9)
Note: Added "Find food" to to-do list
Note: "Find food" urgency changed to 8 (0-9)
FRANKLIN version 8.4(1) running on device 0 runlevel 2
Good morning, Franklin! Time to face the day!

This will appeal to a number of folks on my flist: Discordian Quotes, a fun little project brought to you by a friend of mine. Sample quotes:

- A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.
- Epistemological relativism may be true for you, but it isn't true for everyone.
- Good for you, you've learned to extinguish your personality for my comfort

There's even a Twitter feed!

Next up, for those of you with iPhones, there are now iPanties to go along with them!



Yep, that's right, panties with the iPhone's iconic "Slide to Unlock" graphic. There are some iPhone users on my flist who I wouldn't mind seeing in these. Hell, there are some non-iPhone users on my flist who I wouldn't mind seeing in these. Wouldn't object too much to sliding where required to unlock them, either.

And finally, to some Baptists, God is a gun for hire. These people, who are currently busy praying for God to strike Obama dead, subscribe to a principle called “imprecatory prayer”--the notion that the book of Psalms validates calling upon God to kill one's enemies.

According to this article on CNet News, the Federal Trade Commission has just shut down an ISP called Pricewert, which had sought to act as a one-stop shopping center for spammers, child porn, botnet operators, and virus and malware distributors.

Pricewert operated as a Web host under a bunch of different names--3FN.net, Triple Fiber, APS Communications, and a bunch of others.

I first became aware of 3FN back in February of 2008, when I started seeing spam for all kinds of porn sites hosted on their IP space. The spam I saw generally involved URLs hosted on 3FN that redirected to the affiliate sites of large pay-for-access porn sites--a common spam tactic I've seen before, especially from big-name offenders like Streamate.com.

Pricewert/3FN's business extended well beyond spam, though, and into hosting for botnet command and control servers, virus droppers, malware distribution, and even kiddie porn. In other words, about business as usual for an ISP in a place like the Ukraine or Latvia, but somewhat surprising for an ISP in the US. (Somewhat surprising, at least, until you consider that the founder of Pricewert/3FN was from the Ukraine, where the business culture is such that hosting malware, child porn, and botnet control servers is part of any ISP's normal revenue stream.)

And here's the part where I get all Ranty McRanterson.

What's really, really, really disappointing to me is how poor the US ISPs and backbone providers are at policing themselves, and how even egregiously illegal activity is tolerated by the vast majority of Internet service providers.

3FN's upstream providers knew that 3FN was a rogue ISP hosting criminals involved in spam, viruses, and malware. I know for a fact that they knew this, because I told them myself, with detailed evidence. In February of 2008. And in March of 2008 (four times). And in June of 2008. And in July of 2008. And in...well, you get the idea.

There is, in the world of ISPs and Internet connectivity, a tacit understanding that any sort of illegal activity, including identity theft, malware, fraud, and computer virus distribution, will be tolerated so long as it doesn't create too big an uproar and so long as ISPs occasionally move the offenders around from one IP address to another. Even child pornography is not going to create a problem so long as the hosting ISP removes or moves the child porn if they receive complaints.

ISP abuse employees do not generate revenue for an Internet company. In fact, they cost a company revenue. For that reason, ISPs will often hobble their own abuse teams (I sent seven complaints to one ISP about a hacked server on their network over a period of two months, only to be told that the abuse people were not permitted to take down the server until eight weeks after they had notified the owner to fix the problem--which is about like calling the fire department because your neighbor's house is on fire and the flames are spreading to your house, only to be told that the fire department would mail a notice to your neighbors, and would send the trucks out in eight weeks if the neighbors hadn't taken care of the problem themselves by then).

ISPs make money by selling hosting and bandwidth to people. Every site they take down is lost revenue; every downstream service provider they cut off is a lot of lost revenue. They're not going to lose that revenue unless they're forced to.

Case in point: The rogue hosting provider McColo, which was notorious for hosting child porn, computer viruses (they were a preferred host for the Russian Zlob gang and for the Asprox virus gang), and credit card identity theft rings (Fraudcrew hosted sites on McColo), yet remained merrily in business, with no problems from their upstream providers, for four years in spite of the fact that it was widely known and publicized that McColo catered exclusively to criminal clientele.

And, sadly, that's the norm, not the exception. Upstream and backbone providers will cheerfully provide connectivity to known-rogue ISPs even though the rogue ISPs violate not only the law but also the upstream providers' Terms of Service. Global Crossing, a mainstream, respectable business, knew that McColo was hosting computer viruses and child porn; they simply didn't care. The money of organized crime spends just as well as the money of honest businesses, and often there's more of it.

In the ISP world, often government intervention is the only way to shut down these operators. History has proven, conclusively, beyond all shadow of doubt, that ISPs and connectivity providers absolutely, positively can not be counted on to police themselves; left to their own devices, they will permit just about anything to happen on their networks. The ongoing corrupt business practices of US ISP Calpop, for example, is ample proof of that.

It pisses me off to no end to see an entire industry that has, for all intents and purposes, quietly agreed to permit organized crime, identity theft, and child pornography on their networks as long as there's not too much of a fuss about it, and to take action only against the one or two most extreme offenders after many years of operation. While I do not normally see government intervention as a good way to solve business problems, in this case I do not believe the ISPs will ever police themselves effectively, or even want to; there's too much money in allowing this sort of network abuse. Given how widespread the problem is, I do not think there is any solution other than tighter regulation of criminal activity on the backs of ISPs' networks.

A great deal of my friends list (and a great deal of my Twitter list, and a great deal of the Internet) is talking about the murder of Dr. George Tiller by a pro-life whacko formerly associated in some loose way with Operation Rescue.

Most of the people who are talking about it are asking how on Earth it's possible for someone who identifies as "pro-life" to be okay with murder.

Honestly, I think that's pretty easy to understand. Warped and twisted, yes, but easy to understand.

In fact, I would like to propose a simple thought experiment that I think would make almost anyone able to understand the mindset of a person who might decide that murder is a reasonable approach to the abortion debate.

First, though, it's important to understand that "pro-life" does not, in fact, mean pro-life. Words are valuable as symbols, but in the case of the abortion debate, they are symbols more often chosen for their emotional connotations than for their clarity in communication.

"Pro-life" does not actually mean that the person who describes himself this way values life, at least not across the board. It's an expression of emotional manipulation; we all like to think of ourselves as supporting life, and the phrase can become a blunt instrument in rhetoric ("if you're not in favor of life, what does that make you? Pro-death?"). Once you understand that "pro-life" is not actually intended as a descriptor of a person who supports life across the board, other contradictions (such as the fact that people who identify as pro-life are statistically more likely to support the death penalty and the war in Iraq) disappear.

So don't assume that "pro-life" (at least the way it's used by a radical anti-abortion activist) means "being in favor of life." That's #1.

Once you've got hold of that idea, the rest is easy. I am about to propose a thought experiment that might take you into the emotional state of a violent pro-lifer.

Before I do that, though, a disclaimer. I want to make it absolutely clear that the analogy I am about to make is absolutely, positively not a valid analogy in the sense that it has any bearing on the real-world issue of abortion. The purpose of this analogy is only to create an emotional response that is analogous to the emotional response that radical pro-lifers have to abortion, and to show how the logic of murder fits into the framework of that emotional response.

Please, no flames about how I am "taking their side" or how I am trivializing the real struggles of people who have had to deal with discrimination and prejudice. That is missing the entire point of the thought experiment.

Ready? Okay.

---

Imagine something about yourself that puts you outside the mainstream of middle America. My friends list being what it is, I bet almost everyone reading this can do that.

Maybe it's your race. Maybe it's the fact that you're kinky, or polyamorous. Maybe you're gay. Maybe you're trans. Maybe you have uncommon or unpopular religious, political, or social views. Maybe you have some sort of physical or psychological disability. Whatever.

Now, imagine that you live in a place exactly like the one that you live in, except that it is legal to kill people like you.

Not only is it legal, but people like you aren't even considered human beings at all.

The reasons aren't relevant for the purpose of the thought experiment. Just imagine that oyu live in a society in which it is absolutely accepted to kill, without cause or justification, anyone who's gay. Or anyone who's trans. Or anyone who's black, or likes kinky sex, or whatever.

Imagine there are people who specialize in doing it. You go to a professional and pay a couple hundred dollars and he will detain and then execute someone.

Yes, I realize that there is a difference between an unborn fetus and, for example, a gay man. That's not the point here; to a True Believer, there is no difference. Just think about living in that society, and imagine how you'd feel.

Imagine how you'd feel if time and time and time again, over a period of decades, every attempt to have this sort of killing outlawed met with "These people are not legally human at all. Killing (gays/trans folk/polyamorists/blacks/kinky folk/whatever) isn't murder because you can only murder a human being." Imagine if everyone you spoke to said "You don't like killing gays? Fine, don't kill any gays then!" Imagine that you live in this society, and the generally accepted premises for social dialog on the topic is that you simply aren't talking about human beings at all.

Now imagine that you knew of a place where gays, or kinksters, or blacks, or transfolk, or whatever were taken to be killed, and that the owner of this place personally killed thousands of such people himself. How would you feel?

---

The thing you must understand, if you wish to comprehend why violent pro-life activists do what they do, is that to them, a fetus is a person just as surely as you are a person. To them, there is no difference between the organized, legally sanctioned practice of abortion and the organized, legally sanctioned killing of anyone with brown hair, or anyone who is Latino, or any other group. (In fact, in a supreme irony of the pro-life philosophy, many extremist Fundamentalist pro-lifers would say that a fetus is more human than you are, given that many such people advocate the death penalty for homosexuality.)

If you lived in this imaginary society suggested by this thought experiment, wouldn't you be tempted to take action against what you saw as the wholesale dehumanization and slaughter of entire classes of people? Can you imagine how profoundly angry and alienated you would feel?

The premises of the radical pro-lifers may be fucked up, but the reasoning is not. If you start with their fucked-up premises, then you arrive logically at their fucked-up conclusion. There's no hypocrisy or error in reasoning; in fact, if you start from their premises, then even the most overheated, ridiculous rhetoric of the pro-life side (such as "abortion clinics are just like the Nazi concentration camps") begin to make a kind of sense.

---

Go back to that thought experiment. Imagine yourself living in a society in which any person who had $200 or so could have you killed for belonging to a class that was not legally human. (Remember, this is what pro-lifers sincerely believe--that you can pay to have a person put to death and the courts won't even acknowledge that that person is a human being.)

Now imagine someone using on you the most common arguments that pro-choice people use. "It should be a choice whether or not to let a black person live." "Gays are not even human beings." "Every transsexual should be a wanted transsexual; there is nothing wrong with killing unwanted transsexuals." "The law should not infringe on my right to choose whether or not I want to have a Latino around."

Pretty fucked-up, isn't it?

The pro-choice arguments do not succeed because they cannot succeed. They don't start with the same basic view of the world. If you believe that a fetus is a person, then you absolutely, positively cannot accept any arguments about choice, or freedom; such arguments are as fucked up and nonsensical as an argument about whether Matthew Shepherd's murder was an issue of choice or freedom.

Viewed through that particular lens, pro-life violence becomes, I think, horrifyingly understandable. These people are not insane, unless you count accepting a flawed premise as a form of insanity; once you get past that premise, the rest makes perfect sense.

Am I justifying this kind of violence? Absolutely, positively not. I am not pro-life--not in any way, shape, or form. I do not accept the premises of the pro-lifers, and I also find much of the behavior of organized pro-lifers to be not only counterproductive but also hypocritical. I think that someone who limits their pro-life activism to waving around signs in front of an abortion clinic or sticking a bumper sticker on their car or throwing a few rocks or broken bottles at women entering a clinic are fools at best and the lowest form of self-righteous hypocrite at worst, and I'd really like to see some of these folks--middle-class conservative whites, most of 'em--actually take in an infant Down's syndrome or an abandoned inner-city baby born addicted to crack if they sincerely believe they have any right whatsoever to tell other people what to do.

No, I am not justifying it. But I do understand it. I get where the violence comes from. It makes sense to me. When examined from inside the premises of the pro-life movement, it is the logical and inevitable outcome of logical reasoning. With people, as with computers, garbage in means garbage out. If you start from an unreasonable premise, you will arrive logically at an unreasonable conclusion.

Once again, Safari has so many windows open that my computer is bogged down and my swap file is growing like the Federal deficit, so here we go!

Psychology/sociology

Half of your friends lost every seven years

Had a good chat with someone recently? Has a good friend just helped you to do up your home? Then you will be lucky if that person still does that in seven years time. Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst investigated how the context in which we meet people influences our social network. One of his conclusions: you lose about half of your close network members every seven years.

Why do women have erotic rape fantasies?

A bit shallow, I think, and doesn't really go into as much detail as I'd like to see about things like perception of desirability and blame avoidance, but kudos for mentioning that acting out such fantasies can be challenging for the person playing the role of "perpetrator" as well as for the person pretending to be the "victim."

Geek

Viral video hoax, or proof of impending cyber apocalypse?

As part of an ad campaign for a video game convention, a publicity firm created a phony video showing a group of hackers breaking into the computer-controlled lighting system of an office building and then playing Space Invaders on the building. (zensidhe, you'll love the video int he article.) That's not the interesting part--the interesting part is that McAfee thought the video was real and started sounding alarms about evil hackers attacking building infrastructure.

Art

Other Uses for Books

Books carved into three-dimensional sculpture. some of the bits of artwork are amazing.

Wonderful Body Painting (NSFW)

Highly stylized body painting involving blending a person into a patterned background. I'd love to be this talented.

Sex

Teen who auctioned virginity learns that taxes are the wages of sin

If you're gonna make money, you're gonna pay taxes. Especially if you're in the country on a work visa, which puts you in a different tax class from the get-go...

LELO INEZ Luxury Vibrator

And by "luxury" they mean "expensive." And by "expensive," try $10,500. For a vibrator. A gold-plated vibrator, to be sure, but a vibrator nonetheless. At this price, I wonder how much each orgasm costs.

Ya-Ya Japanese Love Dolls (NSFW)

These things fall smack dab in the center of the Uncanny Valley for me. I can't imagine having sex with one of these dolls outside of perhaps a forced humiliation scene or something. I can't quite decide what's creepier--the "mini" (childlike) ones, or the fact that the Web site carries a disclaimer reading "For those who wish to see photos other than what is on our homepage please contact us by email. These are limited only to customers who plan to make an order. Please refrain from making requests if you are not serious about ordering or in the same business."

And speaking of scary sex toys, Woody Cock Ring and Nut Cruncher (NSFW)

What do you get when you combine a cock ring with a pair of alligator jaws? A sex toy designed for maximum discomfort of the man during sex. Just looking at this thing makes my eyes water!

10 Ridiculous Anti-Pornography Commercials

My own personal favorite, the anti-porn film made by Charles Keating (before he embezzled $1.2 billion from Lincoln Savings & Loan, triggering the collapse of the entire S&L industry) made the cut. The thing that's most amazing about these videos is that they are sincere. The people who made them, truly believe them.

Physics fail

Hallmark Corporation Jumbo Snowman Snow Globe Recall

What is it? A giant, round glass ball, about ten inches wide, with a snowman's head and arms on it. What's wrong with it? If you set it on your windowsill, when the sunlight comes through the window the snow globe focuses the light into a tiny hot point and burns down your house.

Politics

Virgina bans smiles in DMV driver license photos

Because--get this--they're now using facial recognition software on your mug when you get your driver's license. And the facial recognition software can't cope with smiling faces. So they now instruct everyone to adopt a "neutral expression" when being photographed, and reject any photo in which the subject is smiling.

Top 10 Rush Limbaugh Racist Quotes

Is there anyone who can explain to me why people still listen to this drug-addled, racist scumbag? Number one on the list: "I mean, let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark."

Science

Reawakening Retrocyclins: Ancestral Human Defensins Active Against HIV-1

This is interesting. Some primates contain natural defenses to retroviruses that essentially make them immune to HIV infection. As it turns out, we have the gene that confers this immunity--but it's dormant because at some point in our evolutionary past it became garbled. Now a group of researchers have figured out how to reactivate it.

Humor

Picture is Unrelated

Bizarre, funny, and "WTF?" images fro all over the Web. Some of these images make me scratch my head and wonder at the human condition.

Boston Police Department: We Will Let You Know When The Zombies Come

In case you were wondering.

And finally, a bonus video! This was sent to me by the_xtina, who has yet to be suitably punished for it, and it's totally got me earwormed. Remember the melodramatic, utterly over-the-top music video for the 80s song "Total Eclipse of the Heart"? Well, this is what happens if you remove the lyrics and replace them with a literal transcription of what's happening in the video itself. Safe for work, but your explosive peals of laughter might not be.

"What the effing crap? That angel guy just felt me up!" indeed.

figmentj, this totally made me think of you.

Via redhotlips