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Major Major Major Major

Afternoon Fat Cat Open Thread

by Major Major Major Major| November 14, 20192:47 pm| 37 Comments

This post is in: Cat Blogging, Open Threads, Pet Blogging

(No, not the easily-trolled fat cats who just can’t stop giving Sen. Warren free campaign ads…)

This found its way onto my Twitter timeline yesterday, and I just had to share it with y’all.

This story is what I wanted Ocean’s 8 to be https://t.co/cB4dMAgeGt

— Iva Dixit (@ivadixit) November 13, 2019

When airline employees told Mr. Galin that his 22-pound cat, Viktor, was simply too heavy to fly in the passenger cabin on a flight to Vladivostok, in eastern Russia, he devised a plan to ensure his kitty did not wind up in the cargo hold.

…After asking friends for help, he then sourced a 15-pound feline called Fibi, describing her as an “understudy cat.”

When he presented the slimmer pet at check-in, she came under the airline’s limit of eight kilograms, or about 17 pounds… Mr. Galin and Fibi were approved for takeoff.

But unknown to Aeroflot and its staff, Mr. Galin swapped Fibi for his real pet, Viktor, before boarding the plane.

Cute, but there’s an even sillier moment buried in that piece:

The story of the cat swap became so widespread in Russia that it was even mentioned on Wednesday in a daily call between President Vladimir V. Putin and Russian journalists.

Mr. Putin said that the Kremlin did not comment about cats.

Such a terrible policy. One of his many, granted, but…

Open thread!

Afternoon Fat Cat Open ThreadPost + Comments

Pence Administration Declares War on Orphans

by Major Major Major Major| November 2, 20195:09 pm| 52 Comments

This post is in: Gay Rights are Human Rights, Health Care, Immigration, LGBTQ Rights, LGBTQ Rights Are Human Rights

…and refugees, the sick, the elderly, the homeless… but only if they’re LGBT or the wrong kind of Christian, of course. These people aren’t complete monsters.

Daniel Reynolds at The Advocate writes:

The Department of Health and Human Services announced a new rule Friday that would allow adoption agencies and other programs that receive HHS grants to reject same-sex couples and rainbow families on the basis of religious freedom, reports the Washington Blade. Other programs that stand to be affected include elder services, Head Start, refugee resettlement, HIV services, and programs for runaway and homeless youth.

The proposed regulation would nullify an Obama-era policy that prohibited federally funded agencies from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity…

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council — deemed an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — praised the new regulation.

“Thanks to President Trump, charities will be free to care for needy children and operate according to their religious beliefs and [lies about LGBT parents redacted],” Perkins said.
[…] “The Trump-Pence White House has proposed a horrific federal regulation that would permit discrimination across the entire spectrum of HHS programs receiving federal funding,” added Human Rights Campaign President Alphonso David.

We knew this was coming. These dipshits are convinced that this country, in which a supermajority of the population and elected officials shares their religion, is coming for their faith. And they hated that Obama policy. What liberals are really coming for, of course, is their ‘right’ to take government money while discriminating against people for the circumstances of their birth. They’re more than welcome to hang up a “no fags allowed” sign on their church. Nobody’s trying to take that away.

Now, even for a fairly privileged fellow like me, this is going to affect my behavior. I try not to travel to deeply conservative areas as a matter of conscience and personal safety, and this policy makes such places even more dangerous for me. What if I get hit by a bus and the only hospital won’t treat me? Or more likely, what if they won’t let my husband visit or make decisions? But for the more marginalized members of the community, this is going to be much more significant. Catholic hospitals are already denying procedures to trans folks that they’ll happily perform on cis folks. This policy makes it official.

Anyway, this will probably become another “Mexico City policy” that Republican and Democratic administrations keep reversing each other on, until the culture warriors die out, so forever. That’ll be fun.

Pence Administration Declares War on OrphansPost + Comments

Contempt For Democracy All The Way Down

by Major Major Major Major| October 30, 20193:40 pm| 335 Comments

This post is in: local races 2019/2020, Open Threads, Republican Venality

I’ll be casting my first New York ballot this weekend! It’ll be a hell of a lot shorter than my last California ballot, which I swear to god weighed as much as Samwise (pictured).

Ballot length aside, it’s harder to vote here; they only started early voting this year, I believe, and voting by mail requires you to claim to have a reason.

But as much as the state-level Democrats are behind the curve on voting accessibility… at least they aren’t Republicans, who are at war with free and fair elections, up and down the ballot, and have been for a while, and show no signs of relenting. At, like, every level, down to ridiculous penny-ante bullshit. Consider this, from the local voter’s guide. It’s the Republican’s entire candidate statement for the position of NYC Public Advocate, a post that exists to make sure voters have a day-to-day voice in city government:

Imagine how much money was wasted in sending this booklet to every registered voter in a city of 8.5 million people…

It’s but one example of how little those in City Hall actually value the taxpayers like you who are left footing the bill.

Who speaks for your family?

Nothing says “Republican public advocacy” quite like “I think sending voting information to the public is a waste of money.” They just hate you and want you to live in the dark and be grateful for it. (Much like Pacific Gas & Electric, but I digress.)

Another open thread!

Contempt For Democracy All The Way DownPost + Comments

Evening Respite Thread: Words!

by Major Major Major Major| October 21, 201910:53 pm| 124 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

I don’t know about you, but I sure would love a nice relaxing respite thread. So! My friend Louis was kind enough to bring this fun page to my attention this weekend:

This website tells you what words were born the same year you were.

Delighted to share the stage with “cringey,” “chat room,” “FYI,” “deets,” and “perestroika.” https://t.co/Z2yHqYQdXj

— BOO-is Frightsman (@LouisPeitzman) October 19, 2019

I’m the same vintage as ‘dead-cat bounce’, ‘IP address’, ‘graphene’, ‘anime’, and ‘breakbeat’, to pick a few that I like. They aren’t all winners; ‘alternative country’ had the audacity to be first used in print* that year, too. What about y’all?

click below to see the entire post

Evening Respite Thread: Words!Post + Comments

Happy National Coming Out Day…

by Major Major Major Major| October 11, 201911:37 am| 141 Comments

This post is in: Gay Rights are Human Rights, The Gay Enemy Within

…which is all well and good, but it still rankles just a bit.

I can usually make it through days ending in ‘y’ without having to come out to somebody, but it definitely happens more than once a year. As a cis white man with no behaviors that scream ‘gay!’ to the uninitiated, I’m not as likely to experience anti-LGBT prejudice as most community members, but I do have to tell people I’m gay an awful lot.

I’m not saying that this is an actual burden, relatively speaking. But I’m definitely not alone in being a little annoyed by the official annual reminder that it’s not my world, I just live in it. It can be so stressful that, when I was in college, the observance was delayed by two weeks, so that people could get settled into the semester before having to deal with it.

National Coming Out Day began in 1988, on the premise that visibility is good, which is true. Many did not know that they knew an LGBT person. This is the case for fewer people nowadays, but still too many. So, in the spirit of the holiday, I will get the ball rolling: Hi! I’m a gay man! (More of a Kinsey five, but who’s counting.)

(h/t Sister Golden Bear, who reminded me to write something!)

In other gay news, bonus Elizabeth Warren below the fold.

click below to see the entire post

Happy National Coming Out Day…Post + Comments

Respite Open Thread: A Crack In Everything

by Major Major Major Major| September 12, 20193:17 pm| 94 Comments

This post is in: Canada, Music, Nature & Respite, Open Threads, Travel

I spent a couple weeks in Montreal last month as a half-working half-vacation. I’d never been, but I’d heard such good things, and we got a very good deal on a sublet. Lovely city; I’d happily settle down there, though I’d have to learn French for real, which isn’t la fin du monde.

Anyway–they seem to be very proud of one of their local boys who made good:

A mural of Leonard Cohen fills the side of a building in Montreal's Plateau neighborhood. — Taken in the Plateau neighborhood

I share their love of Leonard Cohen. There’s actually a much bigger mural downtown, but I couldn’t get a good shot of it. I’ve been meaning to share this with y’all, and this gloomy-slow-day-at-work seemed like the right time.

So, without further ado, here’s a song that I find calming and centering, even (especially?) when the world is on fire.

Below the fold, a deep cut live video featuring Sonny Rollins, and a picture from a visit I made to his grave…

click below to see the entire post

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Panopticon Creep: UK Edition

by Major Major Major Major| September 10, 20193:45 pm| 94 Comments

This post is in: Privacy, Science & Technology, Tech News and Issues, United Kingdom

Once upon a time, London was the world’s most-surveilled city. This position has since been usurped by Chongqing, a city in the Sichuan province which boasts one hundred sixty-eight cameras per one thousand people. Perhaps upset over the loss of their title, Boris Johnson has decided it’s high time that the UK began compiling records of its citizens’ web traffic.

tl;dr: Here’s an executive summary based on my reading of the linked article.

Currently, the various parts of the government collect analytics on how people use their websites.
BoJo would like to combine all of this data, creating profiles of how each individual uses the whole government’s online offerings.
This is to be done ASAP and in secret. The rationale for this is mumble mumble Brexit.
This data will be “anonymized”, which is not particularly meaningful at this level of specificity. While an analyst armed with this database would not be able to find a person’s usage by searching for their name, the same analyst could easily derive a person’s name from their usage.

Drilling into some detail now:

Boris Johnson has secretly ordered the Cabinet Office to turn the government’s public internet service into a platform for “targeted and personalised information” to be gathered in the run-up to Brexit, BuzzFeed News has learned.

In a move that has alarmed Whitehall officials, the prime minister has instructed departments to share data they collect about usage of the GOV.UK portal so that it can feed into preparations for leaving the European Union at the end of next month.
click below to see the entire post

Panopticon Creep: UK EditionPost + Comments

Byzantine Solutions to Trivial Problems

by Major Major Major Major| August 30, 201910:44 am| 83 Comments

This post is in: Election Year, Open Threads

I’m sure this is true in many fields, but in software engineering, you’ll often see an engineer or team become very attached to an inferior implementation of some feature. As the problems with this implementation pile up, their attempts to solve them become increasingly bizarre in their desperation to keep their darling. You can only hope that somebody eventually notices during code review.

What made me think of this? Fearing Hackers, D.N.C. Plans to Block Iowa’s ‘Virtual’ Caucuses (NYT):

WASHINGTON — The Democratic National Committee is preparing to block Iowa Democrats’ plans to allow some caucusgoers to vote by phone next year, bowing to security concerns about the process being hacked, according to four people with knowledge of the decision.
[…] The Iowa Democrats’ plan would have allowed voters not attending a traditional caucus to register their preference during one of six “virtual caucuses” over the phone. But D.N.C. security officials told the rules committee at a closed-door session in San Francisco last week that they had “no confidence” such a system could remain safe from hostile hackers.
[…] In August 2018, D.N.C. members adopted new rules for the 2020 presidential primary that encouraged states that held caucuses to switch to primaries and required caucus states to allow for a form of participation that did not require attending a caucus event.

Even when they made my preferred candidate’s victory possible (Obama 2008), caucuses rubbed me the wrong way. They’re unrepresentative nonsense, a throwback to an extremely bygone era. There is a tried-and-true method of making it easy for people to vote that’s fairly difficult to hack–it’s called a primary–but these yahoos are so in love with their inferior implementation of democracy that they’re coming up with increasingly desperate “solutions” to keep it in place.

Sure, you could do it correctly, but it just feels better to do it your special way. This is how systems fail.

Open thread!

Byzantine Solutions to Trivial ProblemsPost + Comments

Afternoon Open Thread with More Mountain Goats Content

by Major Major Major Major| August 11, 20192:19 pm| 43 Comments

This post is in: Music, Open Threads

The Mountain Goats (who you may remember from such posts as this one) played a free show in East River Park yesterday. This was great for me, since none of the other tour dates worked out. It was a beautiful day with lovely weather. The concert was very good, as well.

Really just a perfect evening. This was the first time I’d seen them at a venue that had seats, which is important since Millennial fans can no longer stand for three hours straight.

Anybody else been doing outdoor summer activities?

A couple of songs they played below the fold. Studio versions, of course. Open thread!

click below to see the entire post

Afternoon Open Thread with More Mountain Goats ContentPost + Comments

Open Thread: Time Travel As Cultural Barometer

by Major Major Major Major| August 9, 20191:30 pm| 159 Comments

This post is in: Election 2016, Open Threads, Politics, Recommended Reading

Leon Trotsky once wrote, “Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes.” I suspect that this phenomenon is more intense in works of speculative fiction* than, say, spy thrillers. These stories are well-positioned to plumb and amplify the pressing issues and paranoias of their times; more to the point, they often offer high-concept utopian solutions, be they progressive or reactionary.

So I was amused to see the Guardian ask: Why are there so many new books about time-travelling lesbians?

In 2016, I sat down with my co-author Max Gladstone to write our novel This Is How You Lose the Time War, which follows two time-travelling female spies as they fall in love. That same year was also when I first heard people speaking earnestly and frequently about feeling as if they were in the wrong timeline, as the Brexit referendum results rolled in and Donald Trump was elected US president.
[…] But our novel is just one of several recent stories of queer women time-travelling. There is Kate Heartfield’s Nebula-nominated novella Alice Payne Arrives and its sequel Alice Payne Rides, which see two 18th-century women – lovers – become embroiled in a war. There are also Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade, Kate Mascarenhas’s The Psychology of Time Travel, Kelly Robson’s Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach and Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline.
[…] I wrote to each of these authors in anticipation of this piece and it turns out we were all drafting our books in 2016.

The article is a quick and a good read. I haven’t picked up This Is How You Lose the Time War yet, but it’s near the top of my list. I did read two books last year that featured time-traveling lesbians, though, just chewing through a random pile of space opera.

This article reminded me of a fun piece on Doctor Who**, which found that the Doctor was significantly more likely to overthrow the government during the Thatcher era. click below to see the entire post

Open Thread: Time Travel As Cultural BarometerPost + Comments

Happy Birthday, Samwise!

by Major Major Major Major| August 8, 20199:41 pm| 56 Comments

This post is in: Cat Blogging, Nature & Respite, Open Threads, Pet Blogging

This big galoot turned five today.

I had a terribly long day and just got back to the apartment. At least I’m working from home tomorrow, so I can spend some time playing Psychonauts, which I bought on sale for $2. I love Tim Schafer games but haven’t played this one before. Yay!

Let’s call this a respite thread; nothing that would upset the birthday boy too much, please.

Happy Birthday, Samwise!Post + Comments

That’s One Way To Spend Your Sunday

by Major Major Major Major| August 4, 20196:15 pm| 41 Comments

This post is in: Gamer Dork, Open Threads

I went to the park to do some reading today. On the way there, I passed by some folks having a normal and good one, throwing us a MAGA rally across the street from Trump Tower. House left we have a sign that calls for the imprisonment of Hillary Clinton. You can’t see it, but the next MAGA hat over was wearing a shirt that said, “Hillary Lost, Ha Ha Ha.” They seemed to think mentioning the loser of the 2016 election was better than mentioning the winner.

You might notice, on the far right, the flags of Israel and South Korea. They were also chanting “We love Israel!” as I walked past. In other words, it was as coherent as any other right-wing rally I’ve ever seen. Sad!

I’m kind of surprised they used the correct Korean flag. At any rate, I soon moved on to better views.

How are the dregs of the weekend treating you? I did my writing this morning, so now I’m playing Kerbal Space Program. I bought the new expansion and started a new career mode game; I’m trying to make it to (and, the tricky part, from) the Mün.

That’s One Way To Spend Your SundayPost + Comments

Sab on Friday Morning Open Thread: Calling A Bribe A Bribe (Nov 15, 2019 @ 8:01am)

O. Felix Culpa on Just Chillin’ (Nov 15, 2019 @ 7:56am)

Sab on Pay attention to the gatekeepers M4A edition (Nov 15, 2019 @ 7:55am)

SFAW on Friday Morning Open Thread: Calling A Bribe A Bribe (Nov 15, 2019 @ 7:54am)

biff murphy on Two More Children Are Dead (Nov 15, 2019 @ 7:54am)

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Mission Accomplished!

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Too inconsequential to be sued

An army of rabid, anonymous commenters

An almost top 10,000 blog!

The revolution will be supervised.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Militantly superior in their own minds…

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Good luck with your asparagus.

This blog will pay for itself.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Women: They Get Shit Done

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

I showered with Rahm and all I got was this shitty blog.

I can see Russia from this blog!

Where tasty lettuce and good mustard aren’t elitist.

The Math Demands It!

Just a few bad apples.

I personally stopped the public option…

Afternoon Fat Cat Open Thread

Pence Administration Declares War on Orphans

Contempt For Democracy All The Way Down

Evening Respite Thread: Words!

Happy National Coming Out Day…

Recommended Reading #6: Audio Drama Edition

Respite Open Thread: A Crack In Everything

Panopticon Creep: UK Edition

Byzantine Solutions to Trivial Problems

Afternoon Open Thread with More Mountain Goats Content

Open Thread: Time Travel As Cultural Barometer

Happy Birthday, Samwise!

That’s One Way To Spend Your Sunday